DESIGN OF A TELEMEDICINE MODEL

ABSTRACT

Recently, telemedicine has become remarkably important, due to increased deployment and development of digital technologies. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mandatory social distancing and the lack of effective treatments has made telemedicine the safest interactive system between patients, both infected and uninfected, and clinicians. A few potential evidence-based scenarios for the application of telemedicine have been hypothesized. In most under-developing countries like Nigeria, there are large numbers of patients in the remote rural areas that need specific healthcare support. Due to shortages of medical experts, hospitals coupled with geographic isolation and the current pandemic that is due to corona virus, it has become a challenge in accessing healthcare services. Thus this project work decided to developed an interactive telemedicine model that was designed to provide tools for overcoming the unequal distribution of medical experts, establishing meaningful consultations between the rural health workers and specialists located in larger medical centers. A technological approach of the proposed model is based on open source solutions. The system is implemented on Windows 2003 network operating system platform. Web server is apache extend with support for PHP. In recognition of the confidentiality of data contained in the system, communication network is protected with open- source library for data encryption and role-based authentication is built into the system as security pass mark for accessing information in the data base.