The telemedicine system focusing relatively small hospitals

Abstract

 Since 1999, a telemedicine system, connecting Toyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University Hospital with the district hospitals, has been developed using ISDN at 1500kbps. This system facilitates the clinical consultation from the relatively small clinics. As it was speculated that clinical information systems and descriptions of patients’ profiles, vary among facilities, the Medical Markup Language(MML) was introduced. The patients’ information, coded in MML, is sent with JPEG image files by e-mail. In the university hospital, the MML files are stored on the database server with its own unique file name. This system results in good database construction and search performance. However, there are difficulties in standardizing digitized films, and in setting up the router that separates the dial-up connection to the University hospital from the internet connection via commercial provider.