Telemedicine project in the Azores Islands.

Telemedicine projects and programmes began in Portugal only in 1992 with a telepathology programme in real time frozen section service. The main purpose and challenge of the telemedicine is to allow the access of a special and specific health care to populations as the 250,000 inhabitants of the Azores archipelago. We wish to start with telepathology, teledermatology, telecardiology, tele ORL, telepsychiatry, telematernal and foetal medicine in all islands of the archipelago, also connected with the Major University Centers in Lisbon. The system must be composed of a video conferencing station working in ISDN at 384 kb/sec connectors via a switch to the video camera applied to different video-cameras. Telemedicine improves the human, economical, social and cultural life quality to the people of the European, but depressed ultraperipherical region of Azores.