Marine "Telemedicine"

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Permalink Reply by Richard Bennett on May 14, 2010 at 13:29

The data structure is available at http://icd9cm.chrisendres.com/index.php
A very secure transmission protocol will be needed in order to support privacy concerns for the various nationalities of the seamen involved and the doctors supporting.
If a shipping line has a tie-in to a hospital, medical services conglomerate, or a health insurer then it makes sense to use compatible metadata so the information can be transferred into the patients' permanent records.
I know the US Navy had some computer aided diagnostic programs to aid independent duty corpsmen in conducting examinations so that doctors ashore would get meaningful data. Something like this, reviewed and concurred by the physicians on the shore side, would be useful to the ship's officers.
Geographic information regarding helicopters potentially available for evacuation: (hospitals, naval installations, naval vessels, oil platform service companies, etc.) and contact information (radio for the ship and landline for the company agents ashore) would be invaluable for emergency cases.
The military also will lock down the outside connections from a unit when there has been a fatality to preclude word inadvertantly reaching the next of kin before the formal notification can be made; something similar ought to be considered for the ship master to control information release; not just about fatalities, but also illnesses that might affect the ship's quarantine status.