Telemedicine
E-Healthcare
Agent-Based e-Medicine System
Ashraf S. Baalawy Abtract
e-medicine systems designed to improve access to medical care of patient by allowing consulting a specialist about a case without needing to send the patient to hospital location.
Recently, availability of Internet connectivity and client and server software has made low- cost e-medicine applications feasible.
e-medicine is the use of communication tools (internet) for the remote transmission of information related to medicine or healthcare. It is the union of two concepts telecommunication and medicine. In some other papers you may find the term Telemedicine which is used to cover many topics, such as videoconferencing (audio and video), and in other papers you may find the term e-healthcare which means the same. One of the main aims of e- medicine is the evaluation of patient, or his data, without a direct physical interaction, our solution take care about patient data.
The medical services at Saudi Electricity Company are introduced by medical center and almost all of the biggest hospitals in Saudi Arabia using direct contract (without any dealing with medical insurance company). Saudi Electricity Company–Medical Center (SEC-MC) consists of many clinics with specialists of all medical fields. SEC-MC takes care of the patient if his/her situation is simple or under control, otherwise they transfer the patient to the hospital.
This system for SEC-MC is agent-based and composed of: e-approval, e-report, e- prescription, and e-lab modules. It includes also an educational part which we call it i-bank or information bank which contain a short description for some lab's test.
This system is suitable for any organization that uses the same technique in medical services which called direct contract. Also this system – with a little modification according to its procedures - is suitable for medical insurance company.
e-report: the screen between the hospital's doctors, which can be used to send a report to the doctors in the SEC medical center to illustrate the situation of the patient to get the e-approval.
e-approval: the interface from the medical center doctors side, which can be used to send an e-approval to hospitals.
e-prescription: the common interface between medical center doctors and pharmacist, which can be used by doctors to write prescription that can automatically go to pharmacy interface to prepare the medicines.
e-lab: the common interface between doctors of medical center and laboratory technician. It is used by doctors to request suitable test according to the patient situation, then this request automatically go to laboratory technician interface which is waiting for a patient to take the test sample and enters the result at the proper screen.
i-bank: a static part contains useful educational information about all types of tests conducted in the laboratory of the company.
