Telemedicine Conferencing
An Introductory Guide for Engineers
The spread of the internet around the world in recent years has increased telemedicine conferencing, as a means of sharing information among medical institutions in various formats, including visual, audio and presented materials. Teleconferencing reduces time and costs related to travel and enables people to access the latest information, including cutting-edge medicine from overseas and updates on emerging infectious diseases. It also encourages learning among medical staffs and contributes in enhancing English language skills, as needs for such skills continue to grow. At the same time, technical support of networks and audio-visual equipment is essential. However, many institutions are challenged with lack of qualified engineers and disparity of technical environments.
This guide is the achievement of one of the initiatives of the Globalization Project Team of the Standing Committee of the National University Hospital Council of Japan. It has been compiled with the support of engineers from national university hospitals that are participating actively in the project. The Globalization Project Team seeks to promote telemedicine conferencing, with the combined goal of creating international telemedicine networks and contributing to human resources development using ICT. In the course of our activities, we have found cases of doctors who wish to participate in teleconferencing but who do not have technical support in getting connected and also people without expert knowledge on becoming engineers. Telemedicine conference presents various issues such as; What preparations are needed? How should preparations be made? How should equipment be handled? What needs to be done if problems occur? This guide aims to provide an introduction to teleconferencing and give answers to these questions, using illustrations and tables to make processes easy to understand. All descriptions are simplified for the purpose of non-native English speaker. It is based on the assumption that users are participating to an externally hosted teleconference as one of the connecting institutions. The guide features key points according to their degree of difficulty, aimed at people who are tasked with organizing a telemedicine conference at a short notice. It also includes a checklist for different kinds of teleconferences, enabling users to acquire the information they need quickly.
We hope that this guide will help to further promote and spread telemedicine conferencing.
You can download the Guide Here.
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