MEDNET
Latin America Health Care Network

 
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Welcome to MedNET

MedNET aims to establish a collaborative framework with counterparts in Latin America to promulgate access in underserved regions of Latin America to efficient, cost effective, high level and high quality medical resources.

The proposed healthcare database and medical platform will directly impact on patient safety by enhancing clinical services and improving the primary healthcare in the pilot locations. This will be achieved through advanced diagnosis and treatment methods, efficient collection and sharing of data on treatment outcomes and patient demographics and collaborative medical research.

This system effectively embeds European medical protocol and standards for medical information exchange, storing and representation and, given the fledgling nature of electronic Health Records in the targeted regions, will support diffusion in the wider up-take of electronic European standards.
 

Overview:
Access to medical care is sometimes very difficult to be reached from people living in rural and underserved areas. This problem is very well known in rural areas in Latin America. Citizens have no access to health care. They have to travel hundred of kilometres to receive a medical diagnosis.

Within the project, we will develop a medical network that addresses the problems of providing health care from a distance. The medical network will be supported by expert physician located in urban cities of Latin America.

The medical applications will be vary from gynaecology, paediatric, cardiology to typical infectious diseases for the region such as malaria and tuberculosis.

The examinations will involve ultrasound examination, ECG test and blood test and blood test imaging for automation diagnosis. All the patient information, extracted from the examinations will be stored a health care database, along with the demographic information and medication prescription.

MEDNet project will connect isolated region Amazon, in two different countries; Brazil, Peru Moreover MEDNet will make use of AmerHis system (satellite communication) based on DVB-RCS.

MEDNet will make use of European standards for the communication and storage and medical data presentation.

The project will empower medical doctors to constantly and remotely keep track of their patients with minimum effort, assisted by an intelligent automated infrastructure. Furthermore, remote doctors will be able to share and request assistance form expert doctors located in urban cities.
At the same time family and friends of the patients will also have access to the same information, filtered and presented in a comprehensible manner, including latest comments from the doctors. A sophisticated Collaboration Model will manage the whole service and will be aware of each patient’s medical record, providing an information channel between the medical staff, the patients and their carers (family, friends, etc.).

System deployment will be in the following sites:
In Brazil
Referral hospital: Santa casa hospital in Porto Alegre.
Spokes:
  1. Balsas (MA)
  2. Fortaleza dos Nogueiras (MA)
  3. Carolina (MA)
  4. Pelotas
  5. Lagoa dos Tres Cantos
  6. Alegrete
In addition, Santa Casa hospital is going to extend the medical network to MRI and CT medical imaging modalities. Santa Casa hospital is going to find three (3) remote hopsitals near to Rio Grade do Sul states, that need medical tele-consultation on MRI and CT cases. These three remote sites will make use of ADSL communication for data exchange. In total 7 installations in Brazil.

In Peru
Referral hospital: Huancayo
Spokes:
  1. Chongos Alto
  2. Comas
  3. Pariahuanca
  4. Puerto Ocopa
  5. Mazamari
  6. Rio Negro
  7. San Martin de Pangoa
In total 7 installations in Peru.

 

Consortium:
 

Technology:

Teleconsult

TeleConsult is a stand-alone application running on Windows 2000/XP. The application is able to acquire medical images from any ultrasound device through a video grabber attached to the computer. Furthermore, DICOM based agents would store medical images from any DICOM compliant device (DICOM is a worldwide standard for the representation of medical imaging data).TeleConsult application is a combination of a 2D/3D DICOM Viewer, an image grabbing software, medical annotation tools and a medical telecommunication tool.
Figure 1 illustrates the user interface of TeleConsult. The largest part of the user interface is used for the display of the images. On the left side of the software all images, currently loaded into TeleConsult are listed. In the centre of the user interface, there is place for showing the details of one or more images.(Fig.1) All operations, a user of the software can operate can be assigned to following eight modules:
  • The Database Interface menu
  • The Image View menu
  • The File I/O menu
  • The Geometry menu
  • The Greylevels/Colors menu
  • The Tools menu
  • The Cine menu
  • The Teleconsultation menu
Teleconsult is currently used in several European locations, and provides an excellent, proven communication tool for telemedicine systems. The system provides also easy localization options for Spanish and Portuguese

Medical database/Health care records

Our medical imaging application offers a patient management database with the following possible operations:

  • Creation, modification and deletion of patients.
  • Creation, modification and deletion of studies.
    Storing of images, configurations, videos and other (additional) files assigned to a patient and study.
  • Swapping out data (images) to other storage medias, whereby the purpose is to prohibit the local hard disk of getting full.
  • Export and Import of patients/studies and images to external files, whereby the purpose is the exchange of data between several databases.
  • Loading of images, configurations and videos into TeleConsult.
  • Importing of DICOM images into the Database.
  • Sending and receiving of messages, together with patient, study and image information from and to other TeleConsult workstations (Offline Messaging)
  • Importing/exporting of vital signals (ECG, BP, SPO2, Glucose) into the Database.

Satellite Communication / AmerHis
The selected regions in Amazon have no access to broadband communications. Therefore, AmerHis system is going to be utilized. AmerHis is making use of DVB-RCS bi-direction European standard.

Thales Alenia Space España has leaded the AMERHIS project within the Hispasat Amazonas satellite. AmerHis is an advanced communication system, supported and co-funded by ESA and the Industry, to deploy an advanced communications system based on a regenerative payload on board the Amazonas satellite.

The AMERHIS system integrates a Broadcasting Multi-Media network with an Interaction network by combining two standards, the DVB-S and DVB-RCS, into one unique regenerative and multi-spot satellite system. In this manner, the users calling for broadband and interactive services will be able to utilize standard stations (RCSTs) at both transmitting and receiving sides. Next figure illustrates the concept. In this system, the DVB-RCS return channel standard is applied by all users to access through a standard uplink to the satellite.


On board, the regenerative payload (OBP) is in charge of multiplexing that information from diverse sources into one or more DVB-S data streams capable of being received by any standard IRD equipment. The on board repeater is not only capable of multiplexing signals coming from the same uplink, but also cross-connecting and/or broadcasting channels coming from separate uplink coverage areas to different downlink coverage areas.
 

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