An INTEgrated broadband telecommunication pilot teleservices-platform for improving health care provision in the Region of MEDiterranean
The regions of southeast Mediterranean are characterized by expanded inner space and isolated areas. Those makes difficult the socially, technologically, and economical integration and consequently, the equally and efficient provision of services like health care services. The main objective of the project INTERMED is to implement a platform that will enhance the provision of medical services for both citizens and travellers in remote/isolated regions of southeast Mediterranean, and on board ships travelling across it, and the distribution of knowledge and collaboration among the health personnel of these areas, making use of wireless and terrestrial lines. The project aims to upgrade the provided health and learning services at remote areas of Greece, Cyprus and Italy, and interconnect them with central hospitals in all three countries. The platform will provide to the project direct beneficiaries (residents, travelers, crew members, medical staff), through infrastructure upgrade, the following health care services: • Tele-collaboration and tele-consultation services between health care personnel. Those services will support the provision of expert’s advices from central hospitals to rural medicine centers and smaller health facilities, in order to support the diagnosis procedure with a second opinion. • Home care telemedical services for “at risk” citizens, e.g. elderly, patients with chronic diseases, and post-surgery patients. Those services will include the utilization of wireless communications for the provision of on site expert’s advices after evaluation of the transmitted vital signals. • Tele-medicine services in emergency situations, e.g. passengers onboard a ship. Those services will be provided through interconnecting a ferry serving a Mediterranean Sea area via satellite with the hospitals of the network. • Public health and elearning services for the continuous training through seminars for both health care personnel (doctors, nurses etc.), and persons supporting “at risk” citizens. The above services will be provided through the combined use of already evaluated systems, results of EU founded project. These systems supports capabilities for ultrasound images, ECGs, blood pressure and oxygen saturation meters, video conference interfaces, and numerous communication gateways over satellite, GRPS, UMTS, analog telephone ISDN, WLAN. The proposed infrastructure will function as a unified health platform and will offer functionality such as: • High speed broadband connections • Streaming audio/video services • Full duplex, real time communications The aforementioned capabilities will be the result of a series of activities which include, among other, user requirements and technical need collection, platform (infrastructure and applications) design, various subsystem development and integration into one network, which will run in various pilots, and system evaluation. The network will be based on the partnership (nodes) of universities (University of Cyprus, University of Catania), research institutes (NCSR “Demokritos, ICCS), hospitals (Paphos general hospital, Sotiria hospital, hospital of Catania), regional medical centres in Greece, Sicily (Italy), and Cyprus, and ferries travelling across southeast Mediterranean. The above nodes will be able to communicate each other in a broadband basis, through an open architecture. Furthermore the implementation of an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) infrastructure to support proposed system’s interoperability will provide the fundamental basis for future collaboration and information technology projects in the area