A Multifunctional Telemedicine System for Pre-hospital Emergency Medical Services

Abstract

The paper presents the design and architecture of a multifunctional telemedicine system for real-time teleconsultation in pre-hospital emergency medical services (EMS). The application of telemedicine has shown to improve patient treatment quality and efficiency in various settings. Still, its use by pre-hospital EMS is lacking. Current technical, normative standards do not provide a sufficient framework in order to design a multifunctional telemedicine system for teleconsultation in pre-hospital EMS. Starting with a use-case driven requirements analysis, a telemedicine system usable in this setting is designed, realized and currently in use for evaluation by selected German EMS departments. This system uses commercial off-the-shelf medical devices, custom devices for communication and an individual system architecture, integrating the heterogeneous components as required by the defined use-cases