The MERMAID project intranet: mixing satellite and terrestrial telecommunications for achieving “healthcare for all”

MERMAID attempts to combine mobile satellite technologies, VSAT technologies and ISDN protocols in order to realise a global state-of-the-art system for the provision of health care services to the maritime sector. The MERMAID concept for telemedicine assumes that, when practised in the presence of sufficient communications infrastructures telemedicine must be based on live, interactive audio-visual communication between the physician and patient or between physician and physician. Interactivity is viewed as a critical factor in the provision of telemedical services especially in reference to the transmission of basic clinical information (e.g. patient history or clinical observations). Given these restrains, the MERMAID consortium attempted to place maritime telemedicine within the presently emerging framework for practising telemedicine around the world through a series of surveys on telemedicine user requirements. The reasoning was that although, strictly speaking, MERMAID is a maritime telemedicine and emergency medicine project, it can neither ignore current telemedical developments, nor grow into a truly “global 24 hour multilingual telemedicine surveillance and emergency service” by isolating itself from the other facets of the field of the telemedicine