Virtual Telemedicine and Virtual Telehealth: A Natural Language Based Implementation to Address Time Constraint Problem

Telemedicine is modern technology that is employed to provide low cost, high standard medical facilities to the people of remote areas. Store-and-Forward method of telemedicine suits more to the progressive countries like Pakistan as not only is it easy to set up but it also has a very cheap operating cost. However, the high response time taken by store & forward telemedicine becomes a critical factor in emergency cases, where each minute has a price. The response time factor can be overcome by using virtual telemedicine approach. In virtual telemedicine, a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) is deployed at rural station. The CDSS is intelligent enough to diagnose a patient’s disease and prescribe proper medication. In case the CDSS cannot answer a query, the CDSS immediately sends an e-mail to a medical expert (doctor), and when the response is received, the CDSS knowledge-base is updated for future queries. In this chapter, the authors not only report a NL-based CDSS that can answer NL queries, but also present a complete architecture of a virtual telemedicine setup.