Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1999

Introducing Fiv e Area s o f Excellenc e Telemedicine: Providing Health Care at a Distance Telemedicine, or the provision of medical care at a distance, aims at improving the quality of health care both within hospitals and in areas previously lacking access to expert advice. Its primitive forms are surprisingly familiar to us, such as help- seeking messages sent down the telegraph line to a doctor when someone was taken ill in a remote area in the Wild West, or when a mother seeks help for her sick child from the paediatrician over the phone. The greatest difference between the new and the old forms of telemedicine i s the visual element. Modern telemedicine allows visual contact and, unlike television, i t is interactive. Teleconference Begins at CUHK The Faculty of Medicine is considered a resource base for telemedicine in Hong Kong. I t organized its first telemedicine conference in November 1996 at the invitatio n of Telemed ， a major annual conference on telemedicine in Europe. During the conferenc e the Prince of Wales Ho s p i t a l and the General Ho s p i t a l o f the Chinese People's Liberation A rmy in Beijing were linked up with Telemed '96 i n L o n d o n , m a r k i ng the f i r s t r e a l - t i me t h r e e - w ay teleconference between Hong Kong, Beijing, and Europe . Close to 1,000 medical experts f r om the three regions h e a r d p r e s e n t a t i o ns and w a t c h ed l i v e demons t r a t i ons o f advanced ope r a t i on t e c h n i q u es v i a t h e i n f o r m a t i o n superhighway. The conference also saw the establishment of the Ho ng K o n g Telemedicine Association, an organization initiated by the faculty and chaired by P r o f. Ma g n us H j e l m, professor o f c hem i c al pathology. The association serves as a forum for the exchange of views on telemedicine w i th other countries and has since h e l p e d i n t r o d u c e telemedicine to the vast and r emo te X i n j i a n g Medical Teaching and Research at CUHK 7