The Newsletter of the International Federation of Health Records Organizations

Abstract

Imagine a world in which fiberoptic cables are so easy to come by that transmitting video thousands of miles even across oceans is inexpensive and commonplace. Now imagine a world in which video transmissions over fiberoptic lines are so commonplace that a physician in Switzerland can diagnose a patient in Geneva one minute and a patient in Mozambique the next. With the work of the World Health Organization (WHO) and Project OXYGEN both of these ideas could become a reality within the next two decades. Salah Mandil, director-advisor on informatics for WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, is watching closely for construction to begin on Project OXYGEN -a global, undersea fiberoptic network. "We follow this with great interest because we are convinced that telecommunications within a country and between countries could influence health in a very dramatic way," Mandil says. It is Mandil's further conviction that Africa among Project OXYGEN's first ports in its first stage of development has some of the most acute healthcare needs in the world. "We are discovering in Africa that telecommunications and computing are enabling an infrastructure that would have taken ages to develop," he says. "Terrestrial links between cities and the rural areas are a