Asynclluronou§ Te!emedicine System for Rural Clinics in Palestine

Abstract

Today, rural areas in the developing countries around the world do not have the advantage of a fully functional health care system. The situation in Palestine is more critical basically due to the occupation and checkpoint that surround almost each Palestine village and city. This project presents a telemedicine system as an attempt to improve the life hoods of the people in the rural Palestine. The system model compromises two main points, one at the rural areas' end, and the other at the districts hospitals' end. The main aim of the system model is to develop an application that allows the residents of the rural areas in Palestine to have access to experienced doctors form distance hospitals. At the rural areas' end, a Web-base Electronic Model Record (EMR) system is developed in order to store the patient data (particulars, diagnose, treatment history, etc.). Further more, the EMR system allows fresh doctors to consult experience doctor through sending patient cases via E-mail and SMS. At the district hospitals' end, an open-source telemedicine system called ipath is used to receive the case from the EMR system. The ipath is then used by experienced doctors to discuss and confer on received cases, and to send the best treatment back to the consulting doctors at the EMR side. A set of open-source software solutions such as proxy+, DHARMA are selected and integrated in the system based on a comprehensive software research done by the team. These software applications are used to integrate the two system ends. The special conditions of the rural areas are taken into consideration during implementation of these software solutions. These software solutions proved their ability to accommodate extremely slow Internet connection and regular disconnections.