Telecommunication Network Architecture for Telemedicine in Ethiopia and its Applicability

In developing countries like Ethiopia, there is a high shortage of medical health professionals affects the quality of healthcare of people especially in remote area. Due to this and lack of adequate guidance and treatments as well as lack of awareness on the prevention and treatment of various type of disease, a patient may suffer tremendously to the extent of losing life. Regarding to this reality, there should be a means to exploit the health professionals in the country in order to give the effective services. To solve these problems partially, using nationwide telemedicine technologies for efficient and effective communication on health care service in the existing infrastructure of the country is one means of efficient use of resource. On this study the discussion of an important and as yet not fully solved, challenges of health care system of the country, and tries to show how to implement telemedicine technologies for efficient and effective communication to provide basic health care service on the existing ICT infrastructure of the country.to implement the telemedicine technology specially in remote area we designed nationwide telemedicine network architecture based on identified criteria like cost of connection, bandwidth of the network, interactivity, and coverage area. We have also developed simple Telemedicine system (TMS) to integrate with the network design. The system can serve to facilitate both the inside and outside of hospital communications for information exchange. Using the developed system, health professional can share, access, and refer patient's information easily as far as network is available.it also used to share professional experience if patients' case is beyond the capacity. It can also help to improve the quality of health care in the relatively better served urban areas, by allowing physicians share their experience, increasing the possibility of getting second opinion, medical consultation from senior and more experienced specialist.