Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology, RMIT University, Melbourne 3000, Australia.
J Med Syst. 2009 Dec;33(6):475-83. doi: 10.1007/s10916-008-9208-y.
With the advent of high-speed internet band-width consuming video conferencing applications will rapidly become attractive to e-patients seeking real-time video consultations from e-doctors. In a conventional system patients connect to a known server in a medical center of his choice. If the server (i.e. a server via which a medical consultant communicates with a patient) is busy, the patient must wait before the server becomes free. Such a system is not efficient as many patients in medical centers with busy servers may either have to wait long, or are simply turned away. Patients may also leave when they become impatient. Not only the patients suffer due to server unavailability, medical service providers also incur revenue losses due to lost patients. To counter these problems, we propose a distributed cooperative Video Consultation on Demand (VCoD) system where servers are located in many different medical centers in different neighbourhoods close to patient concentrations. In such a cooperative system if patients find their nearby servers under heavy load they are automatically directed to servers that are least loaded by using efficient server selection method (also called anycasting). Simple numerical analysis shows that this not only maximizes revenues for medical service providers by reducing number of lost patients, but also improves average response time for e-patients.
随着高速互联网带宽的出现，消耗视频会议应用程序将迅速受到电子患者的欢迎，他们希望通过电子医生进行实时视频咨询。在传统系统中，患者连接到他选择的医疗中心的已知服务器。如果服务器（即医疗顾问与患者进行通信的服务器）繁忙，则患者必须在服务器空闲之前等待。由于许多服务器繁忙的医疗中心中的许多患者要么必须等待很长时间，要么根本被拒绝，因此这种系统效率不高。患者也可能在不耐烦时离开。不仅患者因服务器不可用而受苦，医疗服务提供商也因失去患者而遭受收入损失。为了应对这些问题，我们提出了一种分布式协作按需视频咨询（VCoD）系统，其中服务器位于不同街区靠近患者集中的许多不同医疗中心。在这种协作系统中，如果患者发现附近的服务器负载过重，他们将通过使用高效的服务器选择方法（也称为任意播送）自动被引导到负载最小的服务器。简单的数值分析表明，这不仅通过减少失去的患者数量使医疗服务提供商的收入最大化，而且还提高了电子患者的平均响应时间。
