Store-and-forward teleradiology in the developing world—the Collegium Telemedicus system

Excerpt

Collegium Telemedicus represents a new approach to the problem of starting a store-and-forward telemedicine network for use in low-resource settings [1]. The Collegium Telemedicus organization provides a no-cost template to allow groups to start a network without delay, together with a peer-support environment for those operating the networks (http://​collegiumtelemed​icus.​org). A new group needs only to supply a guarantor (who accepts responsibility for the work of the network) and a coordinator (who operates the telemedicine network, allocating cases and ensuring that they are responded to). Communication takes place via secure messaging, which has several advantages over plain e-mail, e.g., all the data are stored centrally, which means that they can be read from a hand-held device such as a smart phone but do not need to be stored on that device. Users can access the system with a standard Web browser. …