Overall system architecture
HEALTH OPTIMUM is a comprehensive framework for present and future telemedicine applications to be designed, developed, implemented and finally deployed in the participating regions. This framework will be equally promoted by the industrial partners of the Consortium towards other regions in the Final Market Deployment phase.
The various families of service identified are the building blocks of a telemedicine environment which will enable the participating regions to progressively reorganise the way healthcare resources are spread over the regional territory while guaranteeing and improving the universality of access to quality healthcare services.
The shared clinical records represent the core of the architecture and allow the clinicians and the other healthcare workers to have access, when needed, to the relevant information about a patient to reach the most accurate diagnosis and make the most appropriate decision about the way to deal with a health problem.
The various families of services are in turn applicable to different fields of medicine (e.g. the Virtual Referral is equally applicable to dermatology, cardiology, mental illnesses, etc.) not all of which will be of course trialled during the lifecycle of the Market Validation project.
Out of the numerous candidate services for the Market Validation, the Consortium has selected Tele-counselling applied to Tele-neurosurgery because of the particular challenge that this field represents in terms of both technological and organisational aspects, and Tele-laboratory applied to Homecare because of its high social and economic return.
