Role of Telemedicine in Primary Healthcare and
Practical Aspects of Setting Up a Telemedicine Centre

MANU MANAMEL, ARIJIT SARKAR

Software

1. Operating system

There are a number of options to choose from – UNIX, LINUX, HP-UX, IBM-AIX, Sun – Solaris, Microsoft Windows – 98, 2000, NT, XP. The operating system should be able to support the driver requirements of the commonly used peripheral devices and also supports access control and user authentication.

2. Telemedicine software

The telemedicine software should be able to perform the following functions.

  • Acquire patient information.
  • Store the patient information.
  • Display the patient information.
  • Transfer the information to another telemedicine system over a communication link.
  • Schedule doctor appointment.

It is preferable to have the following functionalities also. The exact requirements would be dictated by the actual equipment that is installed.

  • Capture images from a scanner.
  • Capture the output of the medical equipment and convert to DICOM.
  • Convert non-DICOM to DICOM format.

3. Patient information records (PIR)

The patient information records have to be supported by the software and contain the following.

  • Patient demographics.
  • Patient history – Presenting complaints, past illness, past treatment taken.
  • Examination details, reports and Investigation details.
  • Attachment of images, audio files and video files.The Minimum Data Sets for the above feature must be as per the recommendations of the IT Infrastructure for health (ITIH), Department of Information Technology.
  • The software at the specialist end must be able to capture the specialist’s opinion and integrate it to the patient record.

4. Storage and transmission formats

Any standard database such as ORACLE, DB-2, SYBASE, MS-SQL can be used to store the relevant information. In addition to these, MS Access or FOXPRO can be used for standalone systems. Database package should be able to support data security and communicate with others using HL 7 format.

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