Fixed operating costs include those incurred by the site regardless of the volume of medical care delivered, as distinct from those that increase directly with each encounter. Fixed operating costs are expressed by Equation B.3.

These operating costs are counted only for telemedicine, not for conventional care, because they remain unchanged by the introduction of telemedicine. Data on these costs were supplied directly by Tracor Systems Technologies, Inc., which also supplied assumptions about how the costs might change in actual use as opposed to this experimental demonstration.