Telemedicine utilizes Information and telecommunication technology to transfer medical information for diagnosis, therapy and education. In general, Telemedicine can be defined as the delivery of health care and sharing of medical knowledge over a distance using telecommunication means. Telemedicine provides medical information exchange at a distance, to support medical procedure, with the ultimate goal for improving community health care. The information may include medical images, patient medical records, output data from medical devices and sound files. The telemedical interaction may involve two-way live audio and video visits between patients and medical professionals, sending patient monitoring data from the home to a clinic, transmitting a patient’s medical file from a primary care provider to a specialist. Telemedicine application extends from a simple phone call between a doctor and his patient to remote surgery using robotic equipments. Types of technologies which are being used in telemedicine include teleradiology (sending of X-rays, CT scans or MRI) Telepathology (Images of pathology slides may be send to experts) Telecolposcopy (To found abnormalities in pap smears) and Two-way interactive television.
Telemedicine is still an emerging interdisciplinary field uniting IT and medicine. Today, a lot of the technical activity in the telemedicine industry consists of vendors integrating suites of components to create turnkey solutions for specific clinical settings. In some countries telemedicine is already applied in actual medical practice, the scope is still limited though. The telemedicine system requires healthcare networks allowing physicians from more than one place to join a meeting at a time and these networks should have a capacity to transfer high quality images rapidly. Until now most telemedicine systems are designed only for some departments. There are two types of telemedicine system. One is a telemedicine system, which can be used between long distance hospitals, and the other is a home care system through which patients at home can see doctors. This system allows regular monitoring of a patient’s vital signs and glucose levels from home if the required infrastructure is available. This system consists of capturing a series of images and sending them off to a specialist for review.
According to the most needed requirement of health services in India, the design system will be focused on application of telemedicine for: Tele diagnostics, Tele consultation, Recording and reporting, Distance education and other service applications. Telemedicine holds tremendous scope in community healthcare specially women healthcare. The technology could be really useful in Pregnancy, Mental health-Depression, Genetic risk assessment & counseling, Cancer imaging etc. It is however to be noted that success of telemedicine hinges critically on internet connectivity and other modes of communication and its access to common populace. The system can be operated in both on-line mode and the indirect mode (data is stored and forwarded later on). The data can be transmitted in different mode of communication links, and the system may be ‘bandwidth independent’. As a result, the system should be able to be employed effectively even if only the lowest bandwidth is available in the local area. To achieve this objective, the system will be provided with options of variety communication links from ordinary telephone lines, mobile telephone both GSM and CDMA, and packet radio. Depending on the geographic location, a user can determine the mode of communication that suits his or her requirement. As high-speed broadband networks spread, telemedicine support functions and areas where telemedicine services are available will increase. In the medical field, the emergence of a new format for medicine is expected, to include opportunities to receive advanced medical treatment and provision of medical care by linking hospitals and clinics.
Centre for development of advanced computing offers advance course on Telemedicine and Medical Informatics.
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