Municipal Communications Infrastructure for Rural Telemedicine in a Latin-American Country

A design methodology for a pilot communications infrastructure to enable Telemedicine services in ambulatory primary health care centers located within “Baruta” and “El Hatillo” municipalities in Venezuela´s Miranda state. The main purpose of the proposed infrastructure is to provide voice and data network connectivity between these primary care centers and a chief facility, a local major hospital. The design of the infrastructure was based on a prior assessment of the physical infrastructure and medical resources available at the ambulatory centers, as well as the characteristics of their surroundings. A wireless IEEE 802.11 technology was chosen as being the most adequate for this particular application, after having considered several other alternatives. Features such as technical adequacy, ease and cost of installation and operation, etc, were used as selection criteria. The design included both physical and logical aspects of the infrastructure. The design´s performance was analyzed under the simultaneous use of different applications regarding quality of service, bandwidth, and delay parameters. Simulations results indicate the feasibility of the proposed communication infrastructure for this type of primary health care centers.