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Objectives
The Healthtrack Professional Service (HPS) is a satellite based broadband network connecting medical General Practitioners (GPs), hospital consultants and pharmacies with the pharmaceutical industry and other service providers in the sector.
The service will provide a high-speed channel for the parties to send and receive large quantities of rich media information in the form of text, pictures, video and interactive educational packages.
The HPS will be a delivery service that utilises the concept and technical possibilities of satellite communications equipment installed in GPs offices throughout the UK.
The satellite system allows broadcasts to be received by individual sites with a back channel communication capability, through a VSAT return channel.
This platform is planned to ultimately meet many of the information network needs of health care professionals and provides both future proofing and product evolution for further application developments.
The pilot HPS will include the follow services:
- Remote learning and training.
- Infomercials/e-detailing.
Later offerings may include:
- Telemedicine.
- Electronic prescriptions.
- Pharmaceutical research data gathering.
- Proprietary information network for GP communities.
Challenges
The principle challenges to be addressed during this project are:
- Providing high quality real-time video and audio streams, for live training sessions
- Designing and implementing an easy to use low cost browser application for the HPS network
- Establishing the commercial viability of the service.
Plan
TDuring the pilot development phase, the HPS system will be deployed at ten pilot GP surgeries. These are of varying size and will ensure that the system is exposed to around 50 GPs throughout the pilot phase.
The project milestones currently planned are:
- Kick-off in November 2001.
- Baseline Design Review in December 2001.
- Mid-term Review February/March 2002.
- Final review July 2002.
Current Status
The pilot operations for the HPS project have now effectively ended. Healthtrack Media Limited are currently polling the views of the pilots sites as to the effectiveness of the HPS network. This information will be collated and presented as part of the final review to be held at the end of October 2002.