Guidelines for open scaleable applications in telemedicine

D11.1-Guidelines for open scaleable applications in telemedicine-2-EXECUTIVE SUMMARY SAMTA (Open Scaleable Architecture for Multimedia Telemedicine Application) is an European Union funded research project focused on the medical field of cardiology in Central and Eastern European countries. However, the project results presented in this document in the form of guidelines and recommendations are also applicable for many rural areas in the European Union. The intention of this document is mainly to provide the basis used for and the experiences gained with the introduction of telemedical services in clinical environments of Central and Eastern European countries. For a full description of the technical results we refer to the corresponding project deliverables [1-9] and the coming final report. The project started with an extensive analysis of user needs. Based on the results of the interviews with the physicians at the clinical validation sites in Hungary and Lithuania the services of our general tele-medicine model could be classified according to their necessity. It turned out that tele-expertise and tele-distribution are absolutely necessary whereas tele-staff-meeting, tele-diagnosis and teleprocessing are services of potential future interest. 1 Therefore, we concentrated on the two most important services in the following. The title of this project already emphasizes the importance of openness and scaleability when developing software. This is especially true for medical products where the average lifetime of a system is much longer than in most other fields of application. As a consequence we have built a general architecture which allows to replace particular components or to extend the model without destroying the basic structure. This is essentially done by using standards for the different protocols as well as for the data formats. The big advantage for the medical user is a stable user interface of the application, i. e. he does not have to learn how to operate the software each time an underlying component has to be replaced due to technological development. In general, a scaleable architecture improves the safety of investment for telemedicine users when faced with an uncertain future regarding the availability and cost of network infrastructures. Though high-speed connections will probably be available in many European countries in the next few years the communication infrastructure is nowadays mainly based on analogue and digital telephone lines. Higher level protocols like DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine), the de-facto standard for exchanging medical images, are typically used with local area networks, e. g. inside …