ABSTRACT
Telemedicine has great potential to solve problems such as the shortage of health-workers and the provision of care to underserved rural populations. The Moorfields Eye Hospital ophthalmology projects have linked three regional hospitals in South Africa to England for second opinion services by videoconference and email, and their web-based second-opinion service is used by doctors in South Africa, Gambia, Tanzania and Ghana. The Malawi Polytechnic is developing a wireless network to be used for telemedicine, the Baobab Health Partnership has developed a touch-screen clinical workstation in open source software, which captures data in real time at the point of patient contact. In Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a non-governmental organization called Promoting Social Development in Africa ran a trial store-and-forward project in collaboration with Partners Telemedicine. The project failed, and a new store-and-forward service for radiology and ECGs between a private hospital and a hospital in India was set up in 2005, with a supplementary videoconference link.
