Telecommunication Systems for Medicine

Medicine and health care have to reflect the patterns of population, disease, and treatments, and economic pressures and social expectations, and its is important that they respond to trends and changes. Identifying these patterns, trends and changes is a strategic task, which is among those covered in part I of this workplan, but the shift to primary and home care has already been noted by the AIM Requirements Board and acknowledged generally. Telecommunications offer means to respond to this trend, apart from having contributed to it. Research and development is now needed to anticipate detailied practical implications and to ensure that the responses are rational and consistent.

An immediate implication of change is the demand of knowedge of the central actor, the practioner of medicine, followed in preventive and home care by the demands for corresponding knowledge for the individual or patient. The research work planned in this area deliberately concentrates on the provision of such knowledge or expertise.

Developments in educational technoloiges, in conjunction with telecommunications, offer major opportunities, which affect professionals, patients and the public. For professionals, there are continual developments in methods of diagnosis and treatment, such that doctors have a continual problem of keeping up to date and have a huge amount of data to manage. For the public, knowledge about hygiene has been as effective inpromoting health as almost any advances in diagnosis and treatment, and it can be assumed that the same will apply in the future - to give a topical and important example, in the prevention of AIDS. For many patients, like those who are treated at home or regularly, the situation is an intermediate one, but is especially important for the handicapped and chronically ill.