Health Informatics
Health care, or healthcare, is the prevention, treatment, and management of illness and the preservation of mental and physical well being through the services offered by the medical, nursing, and allied health professions. Health care embraces all the goods and services designed to promote health. The organized provision of such services may constitute a health care system. Hence, Health informatics or medical informatics is the intersection of information science, computer science and health care. It deals with the resources, devices and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval and use of information in health and biomedicine. Health informatics tools include not only computers but also clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems.
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Telemedicine & Healthcare Services
Telemedicine, a good combination of medicine and modern technology is raising new hopes in health care. Telemedicine means providing medical Assistance at a distance with the help of Information and communication Technologies. Telemedicine enables a physician or specialist at one site to deliver e-health, diagnose patients, give intra-operative assistance, provide therapy or consult with another physicians or paramedical personnel at a remote site. Telemedicine is not another technology but a process that focuses on the individual to provide greater access and increased knowledge on e-health. It empowers the individual to manage his/her own personal health, and integrates information to allow the smooth flow of services and products throughout the health care system. There are four main components of Telemetric, all of which are applicable to e-health:
- Remote database access/update
- Tele-monitoring
- Tele-Video Conferencing
- Case Handling/Message Passing
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Healthcare in C-DAC Mohali
Since the Telemedicine department of C-DAC came into existence, we have won laurels winning many projects. The telemedicine department’s first major project was “Telemedicine and its Implementation” which started in the year 1999 and was successfully accomplished in 2003. It was sponsored by the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY). It has been implemented successfully at 6 sites connected over ISDN lines for expert consultation using the Telemedicine integrated desktop software “Sanjeevani”. The second major project was “Telemedicine in Himachal Pradesh” which was started in 2005 and till now 24 Primary Health care centers in rural and remote areas have been connected over ISDN lines using Telemedicine Application “Sanjeevani”.
Apart from this, we received another project from Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY) with the collaboration with Punjab Health Systems Corporation under the project named “Punjab Telemedicine” in 2006. Here also, 5 sites have been connected and further processing for better facilities and wider coverage is going on.
A successful gala in the field of Telemedicine is "e-Sanjeevani", an integrated web based Telemedicine Solution which is an outcome of the research & development over the existing desktop application Sanjeevani. To provide multi specialty health care to the common man at the most affordable cost.
Presently the development is being carried on the project TELEOPTHOMOLOGY which is a project sponsored by the Ministry of health and Family Welfare, Government of India in 2007. This project has been christened as "Tele-Ophthalmology" Software. The most recent proposal to join the wall of fame of C-DAC's Telemedicine Department is the Business Research & Development project being developed for our client.
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Technology Used
Telemedicine department in C-DAC, Mohali uses different kinds of technology to build most of the telemedicine applications in use. The first, called store and forward, involves acquiring medical data (like medical images etc) and then transmitting this data to a doctor or medical specialist at a convenient time for assessment offline. It does not require the presence of both parties at the same time. Dermatology, radiology, and pathology are common specialties that are conducive to asynchronous telemedicine. This is typically used for non-emergent situations, when a diagnosis or consultation may be made in the next 24 - 48 hours and sent back.
Real time telemedicine could be as simple as a telephone call or as complex as robotic surgery. It requires the presence of both parties at the same time and a communications link between them that allows a real-time interaction to take place. Video-conferencing equipment is one of the most common forms of technologies used in synchronous telemedicine. Also there are peripheral devices which can be attached to computers or the video-conferencing equipment which can aid in an interactive examination.
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Research and Development
C-DAC Mohali strives for the betterment of providing healthcare services through its innovative practices, its technology programmes and its commitment to knowledge development with research and development activities. C-DAC Mohali is a dynamic, growing organization, focused on the development of radical new technologies that span a diverse set of telemedicine standard applications through research in various industry standards like HL7, DICOM in the field medical informatics.
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Telemedicine Solutions
C-DAC Mohali has implemented its Telemedicine Solution named “Sanjeevani” in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 with the database support of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and “e-Sanjeevani” in Microsoft .net technologies with the back end support of Microsoft SQL Server 2005. For better view and enhancement of images C-DAC Mohali has developed its product “Image Enhancer” for brightness, contrast, zoom, region of interest annotation etc. C-DAC Mohali has also developed a web–based application “Health Care Management System” in Microsoft .net technologies with the back end support of Microsoft SQL Server 2005.
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Training
C-DAC Mohali provides training to health care professionals for effective use of telemedicine solutions both on-site and remotely through the use of tele-health equipment with the help of training specialist. C-DAC Mohali is rooted in an unparalleled reputation for training design and development. We use our research, human factors, and training expertise in this subject area to develop a package of multilevel training programs that will optimize the utilization of our telemedicine solutions.