Abstract
Telemedicine aims at equal access to medical expertise irrespective of the geographical location of the person in need. New developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have enabled the transmission of medical images in sufficiently high quality that allows for a reliable diagnosis to be determined by the expert at the receiving site (Pande, 2003; Lacroix, 2002). At the same time, however, these innovative developments in ICT over the last decade bear the risk of creating and amplifying a digital divide in the world, creating a disparity between the northern and the southern Euro-Mediterranean area (Graschew, 2003a; Dario, 2005; Graschew, 2004).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Medical Assistance: Collaborative access to medical images, electronic patient files, and so forth to assist treatment of patients who are abroad for holidays or work.
Quality of Service: The optimal design of networks for telemedicine should meet technical aspects such as transmission bandwidth, delay, jitter, data loss, and so forth (quality of service).
EMISPHER: Euro-Mediterranean Internet-Satellite Platform for Health, Medical Education and Research. The main objective of the EMISPHER project is to establish a telemedicine service platform integrating Internet-based and highly interactive applications via satellite to foster networking among all health care professionals in Euro-Mediterranean countries.
Virtual Hospital: The objective needs of the heterogeneous partners in a telemedicine network can only be joined by a real integration of the various platforms and services. A virtual combination of applications serves as the basic idea for the Virtual Hospital.
Evidence-Based Medicine: Selection of preventive, diagnostic, or therapeutic methods on the basis of scientifically based empirical evidence.
Digital Divide: The explosive developments of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the last 10 years have led to a digital divide of the world. Those regions not having access to modern ICT will also lag behind in other fields.
Real-Time Telemedicine: Telemedical applications with real-time transmission of live medical video allowing to work interactively.
E-Learning: The term e-learning is largely used for continuous medical education, both remote and local. Elementary basic information is usually given for free, whereas more structured and complete information is charged.