Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to D Lioupis.
The AIDMAN pilot project will connect health clinics on remote Greek islands with a mainland hospital. We have developed a virtual consultation workstation for the project, together with a satellite communication network. A UK pilot site has been used to test the concepts and applications between a surgery in Chorleywood and St Mary's Hospital in London.
Telemedicine has traditionally been seen as an all or nothing solution to the problem of providing medical service to remote communities. In the UK, however, the majority of the population lives within easy travelling distance of medical service, and it is inappropriate to apply telemedicine for the same reasons and in the same way. We describe an alternative approach, where telemedicine is used to complement the existing clinical infrastructure of the outreach clinic and hospital visit, and the patient may opt to have any follow up appointments by video conference. We also describe the concept of the virtual consultation that we have developed to support our work.
We describe AIDMAN, a pilot project in which health clinics in remote areas of Greece are connected with mainland hospitals, to provide routine clinical service for both chronic health care and accident and emergency. Clinical practice is supported through the use of the Virtual Consultation Workstation that is being developed and evaluated specifically for the project and which is based on readily available commercial products and international standards. The communication infrastructure remains a major obstacle to any telemedicine project, and for this reason, satellite communication is used in the AIDMAN project to overcome the current lack of digital links and bandwidth. The proposed system will provide real time video, high definition image, shared applications and data over a link running at 128 kbps. In this paper we discuss the design of the AIDMAN system, the Virtual Consultation Workstation and the communication channel.