Evaluation Techniques in Telemedicine: A Narrative Review of Models, Frameworks, and Assessment Tools

Telemedicine has rapidly expanded as a key component of modern healthcare, offering new opportunities for remote diagnosis, monitoring, consultation, and patient support. As its applications grow, the need for robust, standardized, and multidimensional evaluation methods becomes increasingly critical. This narrative review synthesizes current evidence on the techniques, tools, and frameworks used to evaluate telemedicine across diverse clinical and organizational settings. Literature was identified through targeted searches in PubMed and Scopus, supplemented by manual review of related sources. The analysis revealed substantial variability in evaluation approaches, with many studies focusing on isolated dimensions such as satisfaction, usability, or clinical outcomes. Although patient satisfaction with telemedicine remains consistently high, fewer studies rigorously assess system readiness, organizational integration, economic impact, or long-term clinical effectiveness. To address these gaps, this review organizes evaluation approaches into six domains: patient-centered factors, clinical effectiveness, technological performance, organizational readiness, economic considerations, and ethical and equity-related concerns. Based on these domains, an Integrated Telemedicine Evaluation Framework (ITEF) is proposed to support comprehensive assessment and guide researchers, clinicians, and policymakers in designing structured evaluation strategies. The review highlights the importance of combining validated measurement instruments with broader conceptual models to achieve reliable and comparable findings. Future research should prioritize standardization, development of validated tools, and longitudinal evaluations to capture telemedicine’s evolving impact over time. This work contributes to a more unified understanding of tel-emedicine evaluation and supports continued progress toward safe, effective, and equitable digital health services.