## 1 Introduction  
Delivering health treatment is aimed at optimizing health outcomes for the patients. Delivering e-health means using technology as a tool to help ensure the best outcome. This article illustrates how health outcomes relate to the opportunity to receive healthcare and medical treatment whenever and wherever necessary, even if treatment is not locally available. The article focuses on a telemedicine communication system as a tool for collaborative work. In relation to this, telemedicine (specifically, real-time videoconferencing) may be considered in four contexts: medical, technological, spatial, and benefits [1], measuring how professionals collaborate in order to deliver medical diagnoses for patients. Studying how general practitioners (GPs) and specialists interact offers insight into how they collaborate in order to solve medical problems. The practitioners' statements place this interaction within a larger perspective by focusing on their motivations for collaborating: providing medical treatment to people, even if treatment is not locally available, by using videoconferencing as a tool.  
Traditionally, collaborative work between GPs and specialists happens at one level of care, _i.e._, in morning meetings [2]. In Norway, GPs and specialists interact by using videoconferencing regularly, discussing medical problems and treatments across levels of care. The goal is to increase information and knowledge sharing in order to provide better local treatment to patients. The use of videoconferencing has the potential to strengthen interactions between GPs and specialists, treatment coordination, and continuity across levels of care and to provide better health care delivery. Improvement in the delivery of healthcare may be seen in relation to the concept of e-health. E-health is a technological development, a way of thinking, a commitment to networking, and a way of improving health services locally by using information and communications technology [3]. Here, the issue is how the practitioners--the GPs and the specialists--commit and network (_i.e._, interact and collaborate) in order to improve treatment and health services locally.  
Studies of the interaction in collaborative work between levels of care have focused on the organization of the videoconference unit in the room and the number of participants as being crucial for the cases discussed [4], how the GP feels slighted when patients participate in discussions with specialists [5], and how the specialist dominates the discussion [6]. Studies regarding medical discussions between practitioners have focused on their use of language [7], how the credibility of the source affects the collaborative work [8], and how juniors and seniors contribute different types of knowledge to the discussions [9]. The studies have not focused on GPs and specialists as equals, providing information and knowledge for the total outcome of healthcare delivery, but on aspects of the outcome for them as individuals.  
When collaborative work through videoconferencing between levels of care becomes a part of daily medical practice, health service providers are able to deliver new forms of health care, which may be regarded as a new method of providing e-health to the population. This article aims to link interactions via videoconferencing to the delivery of e-health by focusing on the health outcomes as related to four contexts of providing e-health: medical, technological, spatial, and benefits [1]. The research question is: How does professional collaboration using videoconferencing affect the e-health delivered to patients?