AIDMAN--advanced informatics distributed medical access network.

We describe AIDMAN, a pilot project in which health clinics in remote areas of Greece are connected with mainland hospitals, to provide routine clinical service for both chronic health care and accident and emergency. Clinical practice is supported through the use of the Virtual Consultation Workstation that is being developed and evaluated specifically for the project and which is based on readily available commercial products and international standards. The communication infrastructure remains a major obstacle to any telemedicine project, and for this reason, satellite communication is used in the AIDMAN project to overcome the current lack of digital links and bandwidth. The proposed system will provide real time video, high definition image, shared applications and data over a link running at 128 kbps. In this paper we discuss the design of the AIDMAN system, the Virtual Consultation Workstation and the communication channel.