Telemedicine Education Program for Medical Students: from Space Telemetry to Earth Medicine

Abstract

At the present time modern information technology is widely used in medicine. Many clinicians have access to databases on different medical specialities. An information infrastructure based on the high speed transmission of medical information allows real clinical teleconsultations to remote areas to be held both in real time, and in delayed mode.

The market for telemedical equipment is ever increasing and evolving. This requires the involvement of many qualified specialists in telemedicine. The main idea of our telemedicine course is to rill this gap in the education of medical students.

The principles of space telemetry lie at the core of the telemedicine program which includes the technical review of telemetry systems used in space medicine.

The main topics of the program are:

• Infrastructure of telecommunications

• Types of telemedical consultations

• Electronical Health Record (EHR)

• National standards of EHR

• Types of medical information

• Web-technology in clinical diagnostics

• Distant cardiomonitoring experience and others.

The students have the possibility to use modern equipment in a Telemedicine Laboratory for image and sound digitisation and to prepare clinical cases in electronic form. Also they can explore Internet resources to search for medical information on the Net. At the end of this course our students discuss their prepared medical cases and diagnoses with teachers and medical consultants. This is the only Telemedicine course for medical students in Russia. We suggest such an education program should also be used as a postgraduate course for physicians.