engleski

Informatization and Telemedicine Strategy in Croatian Medicine

Telemedicine segment is the building block of the CHIS and therefore should be completely built upon the common underlying information infrastructure. Telemedicine is generally defined as the use of advanced information and communications technology (ICT) for transfer of medical information. More precisely, telemedicine activities include acquisition, processing, transmission and storage of medical data, high-resolution medical images (x-ray, CT, MRI) and interactive video. Telemedicine equipment and applications provide means for remote consultations, diagnosis, surgery and education regardless the distance, increasing the overall healthcare quality. Real-time multimedia services are the essence of telemedicine and accomplish direct benefit for the patient and society as a whole. According to this, videoconference is the essential service to be implemented. The videoconference introduces interactivity into medical communications and provides physicians with crucial tool for adequate and timely reaction in emergency situations, in the same way as during normal medical activities. Installed videoconferencing systems must fully comply with recognized standards and ensure acquisition, processing and transfer of the audio-visual information as well as data and static images. Built-in interfaces should be able to receive signals from personal computers, ECG, EEG, ultrasound, endoscope cameras, and other sophisticated medical equipment. ICT platform of the CHIS must be standards-based. Built-in networking mechanisms would virtually partition CHIS into telemedicine, administrative and any other anticipated logical segment. In this way, the needed technical preconditions will be established for implementation of high quality real-time services. Technical preconditions imply guaranteed bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS) parameters for designated real-time traffic flows. From the architectural perspective, the CHIS communications platform would follow hierarchical, 3-layer structure. Dispersion of network functionalities across access, distribution and core layer would ensure network efficiency and reliability. Physically, CHIS will be formed of a number of Local Area Networks (LAN) integrated into an intranet, by means of Wide Area Network (WAN) resources leased from telecom operator/service provider. In order to build an efficient and high-performance communication infrastructure, traffic demands of implemented applications should be precisely determined. Analytical methods and software tools need to be used for determination of traffic patterns and QoS parameters needed. Calculated results will be exploited in order to define network architecture, to plan network resources, to choose proper networking technology and equipment, and to implement QoS parameters.

Informatization; telemedicine; Croatian medicine

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