Wireless Telemedicine as Part of an Integrated System for E­medicine Background and Evolution of Telemedicine

Introduction Telemedicine and related healthcare technologies aim to provide efficient healthcare remotely. It ought to improve the well-being of patients and bring medical expertise at a lower cost to people in need at the right time. Telemedicine has various potential uses such as clinical, educational and administrative. Telemedicine can bring high quality medical service to under-served areas. Perspectives show that telemedicine can provide a solution to various problems such as: access to care for large segments of the population, reduce healthcare cost, bring experience and expertise closer to patients, and solve uneven geographic distribution of service quality. It can improve quality as a result of providing coordinated and continuous care for patients, targeted and highly effective continuous education for providers, and highly effective tools for decision support. Wireless telemedicine is a rather new emerging area. The low bandwidth or high costs of previous wireless technologies discouraged advanced telemedicine services. The new wireless broadband technologies enabled creation of telemedicine services previously only possible via cable connections. Advanced medical services can be provided to rural areas or areas stricken with disasters otherwise unreachable by cable connections, very quickly and with fraction of the previous cost. Wireless telemedicine is especially suitable for areas lacking proper cable connections or places where installing cable links is difficult, economically unavailable or simply impossible. For instance, in cases of natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunami, installing WiMAX wireless links is the only possible way to establish communication and provide medical service. Our project consisted of implementing several wireless telemedicine components of an integrated system for e-medicine. WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) and Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) are the technologies that we used to implement our telemedicine functionalities compatible with IEEE 11073 Standards for Health Informatics. The proposed system consists of medical information systems (MIS), telemedicine functionalities and decision support functionalities. The system is modular and therefore easily upgradeable.