telederm.org: Freely Available Online Consultations in Dermatology

This is the introductory statement of a recent communication from the European Commission that produced the report “eHealth—Making Healthcare Better for European Citizens: An Action Plan for a European e-Health Area” [1]. Easy access to expert medical information and counseling independent of social, economic, ethnic, and regional factors is regarded as a major goal of medical policy today. The visual nature of dermatology makes this discipline an obvious candidate for telemedicine techniques, and the feasibility and reliability of teledermatology is already wellestablished [2,3]. In recent years the teledermatology group of the Department of Dermatology at the Medical University of Graz, Austria, has been involved in several national and international teledermatology projects, with particular emphasis on clinical dermatology, clinicopathologic correlation, and evaluation of pigmented skin lesions [4,5]. Among the activities of the teledermatology group was the organization of the Third European Symposium on Teledermatology in Graz in November 2002 (http:⁄⁄telederm.uni-graz. at). Furthermore, together with colleagues from the Department of Dermatology in Jena, Germany, the Graz teledermatology group founded the International Society of Teledermatology (http:⁄⁄www. teledermatology-society.org), whose goal is to promote the worldwide exchange of knowledge and expertise in all aspects of dermatology. telederm.org: The Project and the Application