Telemedicine is a reality, already

["Irfan Khan" <KhanIA@super.net.pk>]

Telemedicine is a reality, already 

Madanmohan Rao 

The certified elimination of smallpox from the face of the earth in 
1986 was the greatest public health success story in the world. The 
second - but less well known - success story was the use of IT and 
telecommunications in the control of river blindness in West Africa 
earlier this decade. 

"Today, new forms of communications and information technology like 
the Internet are becoming an important part of the national 
infrastructure for health care around the world," according to Dr 
Salah Mandil, health informatics director at the World Health 
Organisation (WHO). 

Participants from around the world gathered recently in Buenos Aires, 
Argentina, for the International Telecommunica-tions Union's Second 
World Telemedicine Symposium for Developing Countries. 
Around the world, costs of health care are going up - but IT and 
telecom costs are dropping. Governments are also coming under 
increasing pressure to cut costs, make their services more 
economically affordable, and privatise sectors like 
telecommunications and health care. 

"The challenge in telemedicine systems is to harness new technologies 
and operating models while also improving equity in access to high-
quality health care," said Mandil. 

Telemedicine systems harness information and communications 
technologies in several ways: for administration and management of 
health care systems, transferring and storing of clinical data, 
surveillance during epidemics, publication and search of medical 
literature, and education and training for healthcare workers, 
students and individual citizens. 

Theoretically, telemedicine can provide crucial benefits and savings 
by reducing the time to travel for doctors, providing faster access 
to medical expertise (especially during emergencies), using health 
care resources more effectively, and upgrading skills and knowledge 
for medical professionals. 

For instance, satellite links between hospitals in Mexico City and 
ten rural hospitals in the Mexican province of Chiapas reportedly 
reduced unnecessary referrals by 60 per cent. Cancerology resources 
in France were tapped from Tunisia via satellite connections. E-mail 
is used heavily by health care researchers at the University of 
Lusaka in Zambia. 

A conference on Alzheimer's disease in Argentina greatly benefited 
from participation via the Internet. Many cases have been documented 
on the use of the Net to save lives of patients in countries ranging 
from China to Turkey. 

Though the Web is not yet well suited for the kind of broadband 
realtime communications that video-conferencing for remote diagnosis 
sometimes calls for, it is superbly geared towards the publishing and 
search of health care literature as well as transmission and archival 
of image data. 

"The function of information sharing, now expanding in developing 
countries via Internet access, may be the most valuable of all 
telemedicine applications," said Heather Hudson, author of Global 
Connections: International Telecommunications Infrastruc-ture and 
Policy and a coordinator at the International Development Research 
Centre (IDRC) of Canada. 

In early 1998 the Caduceus Project was launched in Peru for 
establishing a biomedical information system in Spanish on the 
Internet. Computer networks are now used to coordinate health 
monitoring of 700,000 victims of the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine. 
Web-based telemedicine projects have been launched by the Ukrainian 
Association of Computer Medicine (http://www. uacm.cit-ua.net), which 
provides access to online medical information in three languages: 
Ukrainian, Russian and English. 

There are also gateways to online medical resources of Europe such as 
EuroTransplant, to coordinate services for organ, tissue and cell 
transplants. Medical universities and research institutes are linked 
via a three-tier network called UkrMedNet. 

"The Net has helped accelerate the integration of our medical system 
into the world informational space," said Dr. Oleg Mayorov, chief 
medical informatics advisor at the Ukrainian ministry of health care. 
Online academic literature and tele-education systems are becoming an 
important component of the medical education system. The growing 
muscle of the Net can also be evinced from the vast array of 
resources available from sites like the Telemedicine Information 
Exchange (www.telemed.org). 

http://www.economictimes.com/today/08netw05.htm