Antioquia's telemedicine network: informatic and telecommunication technologies to service of health

The main aim of Red de Telemedicina de Antioquia (Telemedicine Network of Antioquia) project is to design and implement a videoconference-based-network to exchange information related to patients in real time. This information can be data, static or dynamic, analog or digital (DICOM) images, biomedical signals and voice. Our preliminary results show excellent performance when ISDN (Integrated Service Digital Network) at 128 kbps and PictureTel/spl trade/ series 900 videoconference equipment is used, for any type of information. The future objective of this project is to extend these results to implement the network in Department of Antioquia for about 200 health care institutions distributed in 63.612 km/sup 2/ and with a population of 4'779.609.