Telemedicine

Telemedicine has been defined as exchange of electronic medical information between sites of clinical practice for the purposes of relief and/or education. Telemedicine is also defined as the use of electronic information and communication technologies to provide and support health care when distance separates the participants.

For telemedicine to be successful, there must be an ability to clearly transmit a clinical situation, including clinical information of diagnostic quality, to a clinician located far from the point of need, and the ability for that clinician to effectively communicate concerns, additional requirements needed for diagnosis, or the provision of a diagnosis back to the point of need.

For more than three decades, the use of advanced telecommunications and information technologies has been investigated in an effort to improve health care. In particular, the focus has been centered on telemedicine, which is also referred to as telehealth in some arenas.

Telehealth is a new platform on which healthcare provision can be reshaped to meet the challenges of an aging population and more demanding and discerning patients/citizens. Telehealth involves automating all routine healthcare processes, from monitoring blood sugar levels to administering drugs, and extending the distribution of more complex and expert medical expertise.

Electronic Health record

Each person in the world creates a book of life. This book starts with birth and ends with death. Its pages are made up of the records of the principal events in life. Record linkage is the name given to the process of assembling the pages of this book into a volume." Author: Dunn

A Patient record is a repository of information about a single patient. The Patient record system is the set of components that comprise the mechanism by which patient records are created, used, stored and retrieved.

In very broad terms the requirements for a truly global EHR should ensure that it can be used, shared, and exchanged between clinicians of all disciplines, across all sectors of health, different countries, and different models of healthcare and healthcare delivery. It should also support secondary uses such as research, epidemiology, population health, health administration, financing, and health service planning. Finally, it should facilitate the evolution of existing systems as well as the construction of new systems.

PACS

The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) Standard is a detailed specification that describes a means of formatting and exchanging images and associated information. The standard applies to the operation of the interface which is used to transfer data in and out of an imaging device.

DICOM relies on computer industry standard network connections, and media devices that address the communication and storage of digital images from diagnostic modalities such as CT, MR, PET, Nuclear Medicine, Ultrasound, X-ray, CR, digital radiography, digitized film, video capture and HIS/RIS information. It also supports the connection of networked printers, such as laser imagers (cameras).

Interconnectivity is important to cost-effectiveness in health care. DICOM users can provide imaging services within facilities and across geographic regions, gain maximum benefit from existing resources, and keep costs down through compatibility of new equipment and systems.

Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) manages the acquisition, archival, transmission and display of digital images on a computer network.

The acquisition of images as digital data, the storage of this digital image data, retrieval and viewing of images on computer monitors where some manipulation of the images is possible, the ability to transmit the digital image data, and the archiving of the digital image data.

HL 7

HL7 is a standard series of predefined logical formats for packaging healthcare data in the form of messages to be transmitted among computer systems. Another meaning is that HL7 is the standard interface format for messages.
A message is a collection of data that sends information about an event in the healthcare enterprise.
The data connection between two computer systems is called an interface.
It is an abbreviation of "Health Level Seven", 7th OSI layer protocol for the health environment.
HL7 is a protocol for data exchange, it defines the format and the content of the messages that applications have to pass to one another in different circumstances. The following descriptions provide an outline for the protocol.

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