CloudMed: Promoting telemedicine processes over the cloud

Nowadays is common to have health care institutions providing remote assistance, such as, remote diagnosis (telediagnosis) and second opinion from a specialized physicians (teleconsultation), to others medical institutions that do not have specialized human resources, or even for educational propose. The evolution of technology creates opportunities to improve telemedicine services. This article focuses on the improvement of services to support telemedicine in a paradigm "any-time and anywhere" adapting a new emerging computer concept, which is cloud computing. Throughout the paper is presented a software as a service that can be used by radiologist for store, share, visualize and analyse medical images, in compliant with DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) format, from anywhere. Furthermore, the presented architecture allows to improve real time and asynchronous collaboration. To support collaborative activities and their coordination, we created a computer-supported collaborative work service based on Openfire real time collaboration (RTC) server, that use Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) for instant messaging and presence. Finally, the platform was deployed on an Internet Cloud provider and some results was presented and discussed.