Emerging telemedicine applications require the ability to exploit diverse, geographically distributed resources. These applications use high-speed neworks to integrate supercomputers, large databases, archival storage devices, advanced visualization devices, and/or sophisticated instruments. This form of networked virtual supercomputers is also known as metacomputers and is being used by many other scientific applications areas. In this article, we analyze requirements necessary for a telemedicine computing infrastructure and compare them with requirements found in a typical metacomputing environment. We will show that metacomputing environments can be used to enable a more powerful and unified computational infrastructure for telemedicine. The Globus metacomputing environment can provide the necessary basis to enable a large scale telemedical infrastructure. Globus is designed in a modular fashion and can be extended to support the specific requirements for telemedicine.