Internet-based medical teleconsultation system

Rapid development of telecommunications networks has made possible development of telemedicine, and especially one of its segments, medical teleconsultation. We present a system which is designed to provide tools for establishing meaningful communication between general practitioner in dislocated areas and specialists typically located in large medical centers. The technological approach for implementation of the system is based on open source solutions. The system is implemented on the Linux platform. The Web server is Apache extended with support for PHP, and mod-SSL, which interfaces Apache with the Open-SSL library for data encryption. Data storage is implemented using the database management system PostgreSQL. To describe data the newly emerging XML (Extensible Markup Language) standard was used. Transformation of data is achieved using another second-generation Internet technology: XSL (Extensible Style language). CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) is technology which is used for visual rendition of transformed documents. PHP is the server side scripting language which is used to access the database and generate XML documents. It is also used to interface the Sablotron XSLT processor. PHP acts as "glue" to all pieces, and produces the Web page. The system is based on newly-emerging technologies, and it represents a basis for providing a higher level of health care.