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=Collaboration with SOS Telemedicina Venezuela=

====Venezuela’s SOS telemedicine programme at the School of Medicine of the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), is designed to provide expert support to health professionals and students working in primary care facilities in remote and under-served areas, where mobile Health, telehealth and Open Source applicatiosn have particular applications. See the page About SOS to find out more about the project and the collaboration. ====

They aim to reduce barriers to accessing medical services and allow patients who do not have ready access to specialists to obtain consultations without having to travel to do so. The SOS programme offers teleconsults and telediagnosis free of charge, provided by qualified professors in various medical specialties. The service is offered to help health care personnel improve the quality of diagnosis and care. It also provides distance education, opportunities to work on cooperative scientific research projects conducted by UCV, access to virtual health libraries contracted for by the university, and health services for communities.

The project uses ICTs to support the educational, economic and social infrastructure needs of remote communittes in collaboration with them, and must often link this to other areas, such as accesss to transport, or power. (Providing a solar panel to power a laptop to link a community in the Amazon with doctors in the medical school can also facillitate other educational and economic activities for example). The use of ICT (TICs) to support social and economic goals is an over-arching umbrella in Latin America, and is providing examples of how such technologies can support new models of development with by and for users.

The challenge to maximise support for small distributed communities at minimum cost, and with maximum flexibility, has meant that Latin America, like India and Africa, have been early developers and adopters of Open Source and mobile solutions, with implications for provision in Europe at a time where more traditional approaches are increasingly hard to sustain economically. The project offers a unique living lab for the scalable implementation of mobile health infrastructure applications such as [|www.sanamobile,org] This wiki is for sharing documents as part of the ongoing collaboration with the SOS Telemedicina project in Venezuela, through
 * joint proposals for developing areas of common interest in telehealth, ICT and society, socio-technical aspects of telehealth infrastructure, mobile and open source infrastructure for healthcare, telehealth research, and mobile health based education for remote areas.
 * joint supervision of students in software development for mobile and open source applications
 * information sharing with colleagues in Scottish Universities and the NHS
 * joint project development

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