Design of a centralized telemedicine model in Palestine.

To provide patients with easy-access telemedicine services in Palestine, a simple and low-cost telemedicine system has been established. The system is based on a star topology network between local hospitals and a main telemedicine centre. In a pilot trial, a computerized tomography image was transmitted from a local hospital connected to the telemedicine service centre by ISDN (128 kbit/s). A videoconferencing discussion between the two ends was held. The performance of the system was satisfactory. The transmission time for a 1 MByte image was about 60 s. A conference was conducted to discuss this real clinical case by use of interactive sharing of the medical record. The session lasted 20 min. Encouraging results were obtained. The pilot study suggests that telemedicine can overcome existing isolation problems of cities and villages and the difficulties of transferring patients from one location to another.