TAB-IM: Telemedicine Availabulity Broker: Instant Messaging in Health-Sector

01.03.2005

Abstract:
This thesis is a part of the instant messaging project at National Center for Telemedicine. Our motivation is to find an alternative communication between different sections and medicine functions. Today medical collaboration is a key to effective healthcare delivery and continuity of care. Location of experts and the management of their time are affecting the deployment of health services. Instant messaging has some interesting properties that we will in this thesis investigate. For instance; with instant messaging service you do not get interrupted in the same way as with a phone call. You can decide a lot faster if it is an important request or not. In addition an instant messaging conversation you can fit in with current task and you can respond whenever you are available. The ability to view others presence is something we wanted to utilize.

“(…)In particular, one physician suggested to be able to locate colleagues in other hospitals with whom they have worked before and at times call to consult a clinical case. We perceive that the support could include providing awareness of the presence of remote contacts, application sharing and audioconferencing (…)" [Favela et. al. 2004] Page 285.

In our TAB-IM system we have enabled this functionality. We have focused on creating a prototype instant messaging system suited for the healthsector. Through our system healthcare personnel is able to locate available personnel in a simple easy to understand way. We have done this in a careful process gathering the requirements, analyzing, designing and implementing the TAB-IM system. As our test results shows this system is easy to learn, it enriches the communication between actors with among others the ability to send pictures, and it can increase the efficiency at the acute medicine. Having things written down from a conversation is something that also is very useful, especially when a report is going to be written later.

We used the XMPP [XMPP] as a basis for TAB-IM. We extended it and improved the protocol to support binary data transfer and with the ability to have a multichat conversation with more than one participants.