engleski

Croatian Telemedicine Strategy

Purpose of the project: implementation, development and continuous utilization of telemedicine, which will offer an extraordinary advantage for the development of the mentioned island settings and overall Croatian medical product, but also for offering/providing telecare for the population of the neighboring regions and countries ; b) teleconsultation is expected to help reduce the rate of unnecessary specialist consultations and upgrade the quality of consultations, with an additional educative role of consultation for both the referring physician and the consultant (especially in cardiology) ; c) personal communication between the physician and consultant in real time ; d) sparing the patient from troublesome travel, wasting time and absenteeism from work, at the same time ensuring higher quality health care for the island population ; e) aid to primary health care practitioners in emergency, life- threatening states, with particular reference to physicians working in distant areas with poor communications ; f) ensuring the availability of specialist consultation if needed or consultation with family physician(s) for the patients and healthy visitors, which is of utmost importance for the development of health tourism as well as for the Croatian tourist product as a whole. The criteria accepted by the Board of Telemedicine of the Croatian Ministry of Health (in 2004), Croatian Society of Telemedicine of the Croatian Medical Association (in 2002) and Zagreb Telemedicine Society (in 2003) as developmental criteria for modern Croatian telemedicine are the basic technological, developmental, legal and ethical guidelines on the implementation and utilization of telemedicine in the development of telecare, i.e. CPME Guidance for Telemedicine (CPME 97/033 – CPME 2001/112), defined by the Standing Committee of European Doctors (Comité Permanent des médecins Européens). Telemedicine segment is the building block of the CHIS and therefore should be completely built upon the common underlying information infrastructure (Fig. 1). 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.

Croatian telemedicine; telemedicine strategy

nije evidentirano