The Creation of a global telemedical information society

Healthcare is a major candidate for improvement in any vision of the kinds of 'information highways' and 'information societies' that are now being visualized. The medical information management market is one of the largest and fastest growing segments of the healthcare device industry. The expected revenue by the year 2000 is US$21 billion. Telemedicine currently accounts for only a small segment but is expanding rapidly. In the USA more than 60% of federal telemedicine projects were initiated in the last 2 years. The concept of telemedicine captures much of what is developing in terms of technology implementations, especially if it is combined with the growth of the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW). It is foreseen that the World Wide Web (WWW) will become the most important communication medium of any future information society. If the development of such a society is to be on a global scale it should not be allowed to develop in an ad hoc manner. For this reason, the Euromed Project has identified 20 building blocks resulting in 39 steps requiring multi-disciplinary collaborations. Since, the organization of information is therefore critical especially when concerning healthcare the Euromed Project has also introduced a new (global) standard called 'Virtual Medical Worlds' which provides the potential to organize existing medical information and provide the foundations for its integration into future forms of medical information systems. Virtual Medical Worlds, based on 3D reconstructed medical models, utilizes the WWW as a navigational medium to remotely access multi-media medical information systems. The visualization and manipulation of hyper-graphical 3D 'body/organ' templates and patient-specific 3D/4D/and VR models is an attempt to define an information infrastructure in an emerging WWW-based telemedical information society.