A clinical and educational telemedicine link between Bulgaria and Greece

During its transition to a market economy, Bulgaria benefited from foreign aid provided by Greece. One of the projects was the clinical and educational telemedicine link between the Medical University of Varna in Bulgaria and the Faculty of Medicine of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. This began in 1997. In terms of the educational activities, the Bulgarian side of the network supports: an electronic classroom equipped with personal workstations, multimedia projectors and videoconference facilities; electronic design and publishing activities; Web hosting and mail server activities; and satellite communications. Communications are via ISDN. The main clinical experience has been remote consultations in immunology. This experience (admittedly limited) demonstrates that telemedicine can be used to provide assistance to remote colleagues. In addition, the use of telemedicine can greatly improve the quality of care available to travellers and migrant workers in cases where the patient cannot communicate with the attending physician because of a language barrier.