  All of the countries within Africa experience a serious shortage of medical
professionals, particularly specialists, a problem that is only exacerbated by
high emigration of doctors with better prospects overseas. As a result, those
that remain in Africa, particularly those practicing in rural regions,
experience a shortage of specialists and other colleagues with whom to exchange
ideas. Telemedicine and teleconsultation are key areas that attempt to address
this problem by leveraging remote expertise for local problems. This paper
presents an overview of teleconsultation in the developing world, with a
particular focus on how lessons learned apply to Africa. By teleconsultation,
we are addressing non-real-time communication between health care professionals
for the purposes of providing expertise and informal recommendations, without
the real-time, interactive requirements typical of diagnosis and patient care,
which is impractical for the vast majority of existing medical practices. From
these previous experiences, we draw a set of guidelines and examine their
relevance to Ghana in particular. Based on 6 weeks of needs assessment, we
identify key variables that guide our framework, and then illustrate how our
framework is used to inform the iterative design of a prototype system.
