China

In industrialized countries such as China, the concept of using communications technology to distribute medical expertise is not particularly new. However, the development of tele-health is relatively new in China. The earliest telehealth activities began in the late 1980s. An emergency consultation in 1986 that was provided for a ship’s crew via radiotelegrams is recognized as the earliest telehealth activity in China. In 1988, the General Army Hospital in Beijing carried out a neurosurgery case discussion with a German hospital. Shanghai Medical University developed one of the earliest tele-medicine systems in China. In September 1994, they succeeded in performing a tele-consultation between the Huashan hospital and staff at the Shanghai Jiaotong University.

SMU was a pioneer of telehealth in China.Shanghai Medical University (SMU) provided medical services, teaching and research, and had about 5000 students. It had an excellent technical reputation in China. Many departments in SMU-affiliated hospitals were well equipped, and some departments were ranked the best in the country. In 2000, SMU was merged with Fudan University to set up a new Fudan University.

The SMU Telemedicine Centre developed many administrative rules for remote consultation in China. Only professors or associate professors were eligible to provide telehealth services. The operation staff had to have completed special training in the network. When the service users requested a remote consultation, they had to submit full information about the patients. Because most of the hospitals in the network from remote and rural areas lacked digital devices, they often needed to digitize images using a digital scanner.

The Telemedicine Centre provided a set of operational guidelines for the service users after their research in this field. The Telemedicine Centre also designed a procedure for remote consultation administration. In 1999, it developed a web-based remote consultation administration database. By using this database, the service users could apply for remote medical consultation services via the network, and the Telemedicine Centre could despatch remote consultation requests to the appropriate service providers. Also, the consultation providers in Shanghai could schedule the remote consultations via the network. As a multimedia database, it could accept data in the form of images, video and audio information relating to the remote cases that needed consultation.