Telehealth and telemedicine services

Telemedicine is an emerging and widely used ICT (Information and communications technology) solution to smooth the communication between patients and healthcare professionals, by allowing video and voice transfer over the Internet.

Telemedicine is a hybrid term that means literally to execute remotely medical tasks, by taking advantage mainly of audio and Video facilities. Broadly speaking, governs and healthcare institutions (e.g. hospitals and medical centres) are aware nn the use of telemedicine to provide a widely access to medical care from all the individuals, especially those that are not near from the main cities and hospitals. European Commission (EC) advocates telemedicine developments as a crucial part of its document “eHealth Action Plan 2012-2020: Innovative healthcare for the 21st century”.

A major contribution of ICT is to narrow distances between people, to enable the communication process and to enhance citizens’ daily routines. ICT technologies in the healthcare industry are booming with Telemedicine follows that trend. The wide set of solutions available for telemedicine by hospitals and healthcare centres are usually proprietary, need to be installed on a computer, was designed to be used by a particular kind of professionals, may have costs associated and are confined to the use of the Video camera and microphone. As an example, a tele-consultancy given by a doctor to a patient using the well-known Skype software implies that this has to be previously installed in the computers. Another example is the remote consultancy in cardio-paediatrics given by highly specialized doctors, in which they analyse in real-time the images provided by a camera installed in an ultrasound probe device.