Guidelines for designing wireless communications for rural telemedicine in developing countries:

• Data gathering (General population demographic data, Geography of the deployment area, including terrain elevation data and environmental features, etc)
• Establishing what telemedicine applications are required (a communications technology which is low-cost, robust, readily available, and easy to operate and maintain.)
• Choosing the technology that would optimize the quality/cost relation (a wireless WAN is usually the best option)
• Designing the physical infrastructure (includes extensive radio frequency studies to assess noise and interference)
• Extensive simulation analysis of the expected network traffic.