Satcom based distance education in medicine - evaluation of Orissa telemedicine network

Abstract

Indian sub-continent is a vast country having large land mass. There are about 150 medical colleges located in twenty-one states. In recent times many super-specialties and sub-specialties in the medical sciences have been developed. Medical experts in these fields are few and are located in large university medical centers. Medical education is unique in the sense clinical material constitutes study material. Since most of the medical colleges aim at providing education at graduate and postgraduate level, such super/ sub-specialty areas are not covered enough. Telemedicine technology using Indian satellite communication system was used in Orissa state (located in eastern part of India) connecting three of its medical colleges with Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow, an university academic medical center ( located 1500 kms. away in the northern part of India) with the objective of imparting need based education in some specialized area from a distance. The project is under operation for last one year. Audit at the end of one year is being presented in this report. Based on the feed back received from the user's and provider's end we found it worthwhile to use telemedicine technology based on satellite communication effective enough to optimally utilize the knowledge of few experts in certain specialized areas for the benefit of medical students in far off medical colleges.

The Technological Growth in eHealth Services

“…In references [ 25 , 26 ], the authors explain the use of satellite communication to utilize the knowledge of specialized experts in certain specialized field whereas [ 27 ] explains the innovative ways through satellite communication for providing medical education and training of health professional on surgical techniques.…”

Reengineering Clinical Research with Informatics

“…More robust educational programs have been recommended as a catalyst for an enhanced research workforce. 38 On-line resources to help educate and engage researchers can offer distinct advantages over traditional educational methods, 44 including time-independent access to course materials, a geography-independent educational medium, and added capability to correspond with instructors and colleagues. Initial attempts to use multimedia and the Internet to educate clinicians have shown positive results.…”

Real Time Simulation of Medical Diagnosis with Confidence Levels on Distributed Knowledge Nodes

“…Medical researchers have applied Internet Technology into various design aspects starting from [12] originated from the [13] project, to the designs of [11] and [21] equipping medical devices and their results to illustrate them on the Internet while WebMIA in [22] and grid servers of DM2 using DICOM in [5] provided medical image processing on the Internet. With many design aspects, the telemedicine has been applied with mobile technology in [4] to support three cores of Naval Telemedicine -hospitals, Fleet Naval Consultation and Diagnostic Centers and hospital ships, [15] using PDA to support online medical information management, [16] to support many sport events located in rural area in Japan and [14] and [9] for medical education.…”