End of Users Health care for patients

12 Ever since The Radio Doctor was launched eight decades ago, there are various links between medicine and technology in almost all areas of healthcare practices. As the development of the health informatics from the first computer has been briefly explained we should now focus on recent developments that have the potential for further progress. Privacy and security are one of the major problems that many would be debated. Cases of personal information of patients being exposed are caused by security breach and lots of storage devices. The most crucial aspect of health informatics is making sure that the security and privacy of personal information including pro- tection against information alteration or stealing and policy assurance that states that the information will not be abused by any parties including those who have access to the patient’s records. Apart from assuring the privacy and safeguarding the medical data, other matters need to be addressed also as health infor- matics involves a wide variety of topics that associate re- sources, people and devices which are developing and progressing independently continuously. In the USA during 1950s, Robert Ledley initiated a dental project, which marks the earliest record of modern informatics arrangement. It was done for the National Bureau of Standards which is now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology Ledley, 1965, ZAHN et al 1972, LEHNER et al 1998. The next couple of years saw more new medical information systems being developed in USA and most of the programmers are developed independently. Therefore, it is not feasible to develop a standard for health informatics systems. In 1967, the International Medical Informatics Association IMIA was founded to manage the progress of health informatics and as- sociated advancement in technology. Shortly after the for- mation of IMIA, the Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System language MUMPS was devel- 13 oped for the application for healthcare. Currently, MUMPS is still utilized in electronic health recording systems. Later in 1974, a standard was introduced as the demand for different programming languages for different computer platforms came into the picture. Nowadays the development of medical appli- cations for different computer platforms are developed and used as ‘Cach´e’. However, a lot of current electronic health record systems are developed by relational databases .Therefore, the development of healthcare informatics shows a wide range of areas which is associated with IT. It includes all features of technologies associated with caring, consulting, treating, preventing, monitoring and rehabilitating. Our discus- sion will now focus on networking and communication tech- nology for healthcare purposes.

1.4 Types of Different Definitions of Telemedicine

Telemedicine aims to support various medical application and services through a combination of information and communica- tion technology ICT, multimedia and computer networking technologies. According to wiki, telemedicine is defined as an application whereby medical information is sent through the phone, internet and sometimes other network for remote medi- cal procedures or examinations and consultation. It is similar to the definition given in Section 1.5. Also, Telemedicine Infor- mation Exchange Brown 1996, NG, H et al 2006 describe telemedicine as the transfer of medical data through the utiliza- tion of electronic signals from one site to another by telephones, the internet, PCs, videoconferencing and satellites that aim to improve health care. Reid 1996, MAHEU, M et al 2002, JENNETT, P et al 2003 however specify telemedicine as utiliz- ing the advancement in telecommunication to transfer health information and support health care services regardless of the geographical, social, time and cultural barriers. Kantor’s 1997, BASHSHUR, R et al 2000 Telemedicine Report to Congress