Last update: August 15, 1996

MERMAID Medical Emergency Aid Through Telematics (MERMAID) is a Health Care Telematics project that was conceived in response to the implementation of Council Directives 92/29 and 93/103. These directives specify minimum norms for health care services at sea, establish the "use of long distance medical consultation" and have major implications for the protection and the safety and health of both the maritime workers and the distant or isolated populations of the EU who must be self -reliant in terms of their health care needs. Medical emergencies under these circumstances can easily evolve into critical situations, managed by inexperienced colleagues. Against this background, and following the stated common G7 and EU policy on "Global Healthcare applications" as specified in the G7 Information Society Conference (Brussels, Feb. 25 & 26, 1995), MERMAID set up an integrated 24-hour multilingual, telematic, around-the-world medical emergency service that will transfer medical expertise, via satellite and ground based ISDN networks, when and where necessary. In this way, MERMAID will serve as a generic model for telemedicine in the EU and as a pilot project within the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System. The wide coverage and low cost combination

which currently available technologies provide, means that: voice- only teleconsultation is no longer an acceptable telemedical practice patient-doctor relationships, built by face -to-face consultation and visual inspection regain their prominence in teleconsultation telemedical interventions, which are critically dependent on local paramedic skills can now receive multimedia support on medical procedure (to supplement local skills). MERMAID intends to develop: A locally resident multimedia medical guide for ships, to be used both for training and as a reference during emergencies. A system of INMARSAT-A (ship to shore ) links for the transfer of image, sound, text (patient anamnesis) and signals, thus introducing medical telepresence on a world wide scale. The telematic means for the medical teleconsultant to interact, remotely, with the local multimedia medical guide and demonstrate health care procedures to local paramedics, efficiently and cost-effectively. The hub(s) of the system will be connected to an ISDN network linking together the MERMAID health service providers (hospitals, clinics, speciality medical centres).

This network will handle requests for help broadcast over MERMAID INMARSAT-A links and route them to one or more specialists depending on type of help needed (e.g. traumatology, internal medicine, etc.), language(s) required for efficient communication, proximity to the site of emergency (for medical evacuations), etc. It should be noted that this network will be easily upgradeable to the evolution in communications technologies and could eventually serve as the backbone for hospitals around the world to participate in a global telemedicine system. The main innovations of the MERMAID proposals are that by relying on telepresence (a generic technology) for telemedicine it also opens the possibility of developing other remotely based applications (e.g., tele-inspection), it combines on-line consultation using locally stored multimedia reference material, with remote consultation, and it proposes a viable solution to the problem of missing medical expertise for isolated populations. MERMAID is built upon well-researched users needs and is supported by the involvement of a very strong user group in all its developmental stages. It is significant that its pilot sites represent 1% of the total merchant marine world tonnage, a size that guarantees not only the validity of its outcome but also a strong starting point for the dissemination of its results. For further information please contact: George Anogianakis, Aristotle University of Thessalonika, GR-54006, Thessalonika, Greece. E-Mail: STAV@NOVELIX.MED. AUTH.GR.

 

	Copyright 1996 © EHTO All rights reserved This server is the only official EHTO WWW knowledge repository. Mail suggestions to: webmaster@ehto.org