The National Languages Satellite-Sites keep actively moving on !
Besides official decisions already taken by Finland, Romania, Ukraine and South Africa, very recently Germany, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic have also started to prospect local possibilities to create their Satellite-Sites, still this year. For this purpose this last group of Eastern Countries have created a consortium together with Romania and Finland, and this group has submitted a proposal to the INCO COPERNICUS programme, in order to get the necessary funds for the launching of a network of their Satellite-Sites.
Therefore, EHTO Network is expanding beyond the initial previsions that we have made for this first year of the Satellites Network activity.
EHTO (through its Coordinator, Maria Laires) has actively participated in June 97 in the First World Telemedicine Symposium for Developing Countries, sponsored by ITU, INMARSAT and the MIDJAN Group. The EHTO WEB has installed a "kiosk" in the conference place (a final report on this conference will be published in the EHTO server), and most of participants have visited it. Developing African countries which express in the same language seemed to be very much attracted by the innovative concept of Satellite-Sites, mainly because this will help them to obtain synergies and make economic and health care achievements, including a more effective coverage of their populations in the far regions. In order to move on in that direction (installing a Satellite-Site platform to serve a group of countries) they intend to create specific groups of economic interest together with telecom operators, SAT's industries, banks, and other potential value-added organizations.
As a consequence of the above fruitful participation, EHTO was invited to :
become a member of the Midjan Group. A first task of EHTO related with this new membership will be to contribute to the Health telematics and Conference dissemination and to the Internet demonstration of applications and services in Developing Countries, in the next "WORLD TELECOM DEVELOPMENT CONFERENCE" (WT DC), in Malta, March 98.
to join the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) Study Group -2 (Telemedicine) Rapporteur's group. A major goal for EHTO will be to collaborate in the set-up of a list or directory to TELEMED Companies and of service providers (products, services, and software, at low cost), whenever they demonstrate to be appropriate to be used in developing countries (also taking into account their technological, and financial global resources). EHTO will be a significant contriubtor to sucha a list, and at the same time, it also could advice the use of European expertise, if required.
