Clinical Decision Support System Based Virtual Telemedicine

Telemedicine is a blessing for the people of remote areas because it provides high level medical facilities in an efficient way at low cost. Store-and-Forward method of telemedicine suits more to the progressive countries like Pakistan as not only because it is easy to set up but also due to its cheap operating cost. However, the high response time taken by store & forward telemedicine becomes a critical factor in emergency cases, where each minute has a price. The response time factor can be overcome by using virtual telemedicine approach. In virtual telemedicine, a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) is deployed at rural station. The CDSS is intelligent enough to diagnose a patient's disease and prescribe proper medication. In a case, the CDSS can not answer a query, the CDSS immediately sends an e-mail to a medical expert (doctor) and when the response is received the CDSS knowledge-base is updated for the future queries. In this research paper, we not only report a NL-based CDSS that can answer NL queries but also present a complete architecture of a virtual telemedicine setup.