The NIVEMES project suggests solutions to this problem, by employing state-of-the-art IT technology aiming in advancing the quality of life of the aforementioned population groups. Specifically, NIVEMES creates a software system which will be installed in a number of Health Provision Organisations and which will facilitate the provision of health services european-wide in an integrated and uniform fashion to remote, isolated places and at sea for both routine and emergency situations.

It is implemented by a well-balanced consortium that consists of Technology providers, User Sites, International Organisations. In the group there are four Testbed sites from different EU countries, namely CENTIS in Portugal, Salhgrenska University Hospital in Sweden, The Southern Health Board in Ireland and the Agia Eleni Hospital in Greece.

NIVEMES is based on ATKOSoft a_medLine software suite technology that implements the basic principles described below. The a_medLine software suite was awarded one of the ITEA ’96 prizes. The project is under the sponsorship of the International Transport workers Federation.

Purpose and objectives

he project will develop:

• A core of integrated healthcare services, support functions and applications used by a network of Telemedicine healthcare providers-medical institutions (users).
• A set of integrated healthcare services offered by this network, targeting the following end-user groups:
  1. mobile user groups, applicable to the maritime industry, with the provision of Telemedicine services to sailors of ship vessels.
  2. remote site population, applicable to the population of the many isolated small Islands.

The basic outcome of the project will be the formation of the NIVEMES network of Telemedicine Healthservice provides, having as initial members the medical institutions participating in the project.

The project mission defines a very broad project framework. The technology used for this project, due to its design requirements, makes the resulting system applicable to more general cases than the ones of the ship vessels and remote populations that will be the project’s target.

The NIVEMES system will employ Telemedicine, Teleconsultation, Videoconferencing over ISDN links, Smart Cards and will utilise a powerful Multimedia Health Record in order to be able to accurately and immediately respond in requests for medical aid. Therefore, medical data and medical aid will be readily available equally from all networking medical sites, enabling the provision of medical services to all remote areas and ship vessels on-board that are gaining connection to a NIVEMES site.

NIVEMES enhances the existing services in the field by introducing a new unique approach to telemedicine which allows for a modular, scaleable, expandable and multistage benefit approach, which enable the utilisation of the NIVEMES Network, for the sake of the end users medical treatment, even in cases when not the whole set of NIVEMES Services and operations is available, due to occasional, technical or legal unavailability of some of the system modules. Four are the fundamental stages defined on the grounds of this approach:

1. On Site Automatic Multimedia-Multimodal Medical Data Acquisition.
2. Automatic Digital Lossless Transfer of the Medical Data to the Site(s) of the Expertise of the Telemedicine - Teleconsultation Session.
3. Existence of a Powerful Multimedia Health Record at the Site of the Expertise of the Telemedicine - Teleconsultation Session populated with a set of Supportive Functions like comparisons and quick views on medical reading, prescription checking e.t.c., which provide a complete IT coverage.
4. Database with Medical Aids.

As a reaction to these problems, the NIVEMES encompasses features, like Local Language Support, Maximisation of the use of Codified Information, 1:1 Correspondence Mappings, Partial Mapping Schemata, Prioritised Marking of Information.

Results

Therefore the main results of the project up to now are:

• Development of the following Software modules
  • NIVEMES Ship & Land End Node software
  • Telemedicine Module
  • Multimedia Health Records application
  • InterNIVEMES Telemedicine module
• Installation of the above modules to the four Testbed sites

List of deliverables

YEAR 1

YEAR 2

YEAR 3

List of participants

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