1. (a) The field of information science concerned with the analysis and
dissemination of medical data through the application of computers to
various aspects of health care and medicine (Source: http://www.who.int./health_topics/medical_informatics/en),

(b) Use of information technology to deliver medical services and
information from one location to another,

(c) The provision of healthcare (using ICT facilities) (Application of innovative medical and information technologies to health care.
It has the potential to expand access to care, manage cost, improve health care delivery, transform research, and ultimately improve health outcomes. (Source: Beneteau, Lesley and Steve Orsine (2001): e-health: The emerging frontier in health care, http://www.oha.com/).

2. 1. Accuracy of information (26.33), 2. Trustworthiness (11.45), 3.
Finding information / Navigation (10.99), 4. Availability of information (8.85), and 5. “Junk” Web sites (5.84), according to the 8th online survey of health and medical Internet users conducted by the Health on the Net (HON) Foundation (n=2,621; Survey conducted between May and June 2002. Figures in parentheses denote the percentage of response). For details, visit the Web site http://www.hon.ch/Survey/8th _HON_results.html)


3. (a) 25,000 – 30,000. These sites are and will be major sources of
information and misinformation. (Source: Svensson, Per Gunnar (2002):
eHealth Applications in Health Care Management, http://www.ehealthinternational.org/content/1/1/5),
and

(b) Diabetes, asthma and flu in December 2003, according to MedHunt.
The three most requested terms in April 2002 were, however, diabetes,
asthma and cancer. (Source: http://www.hon.ch/Global/stat.html).

4. (a) Joshua Lederberg in 1968 at Stanford University, and

(b) Ram Chandra Sharma (Source: http://www.jaipurfoot.org). Jaipur
foot is a highly popular artificial limb initially developed in Jaipur, the
capital of Rajasthan. The service is being provided by a
non-governmental organisation (NGO) called Bhagwan Mahaveer
Viklang Sahayata Samiti (BMVSS). Till March 2003, the NGO
had provided 690,480 artificial limbs, etc, in India and 15,169 in
19 foreigncountries.

5. (a) MedHunt (http://www.hon.ch/MedHunt),

(b) Medic8 (http://www.medic8.com),

(c) MedHelp (http://www.medhelp.org/search.htm),

(d) Enpsychlopedia (http://www.enpsychlopedia.com/), and

(e) Med411 (http://www.med411.com) are all medical search engines.

6. The Health on the Net Code (HONcode). It is a standard for responsible self-regulation of health and medical Web sites introduced in July 1996 by Health on the Net Foundation, a non-governmental organisation founded in Geneva, Switzerland in 1955. The standard, an authoritative set of voluntary guidelines designed to raise the quality of Web-based medical and health information, encourages this through specifying the authority, complementarity, confidentiality, proper attribution, justifiability and validity of the medical advice and information provided. HONcodeHunt, a search tool of HON Foundation, can verify or search HONcode accredited web sites. HONcode has more than
3,000 subscribing Web sites in 36 countries. (Source: http://www.hon.ch/Project/HONcode.html).

7. http://www.medbioworld.com/. This web site is owned by Medbioworld, Inc., Princeton, New Jersey.


8. Britain. (Source: Ellen Beck (2004): E-Records Key to Better Healthcare, United Press International, January 28, Washington, http://www.us.cgey.com/news/eprints/UPI_012804.pdf).

9. (a) $60,

(b) $10,

(c) $2, and

(d) 25 cents, according to Dr Peter Kongstvedt, Vice President, Managed Care Practice for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. (Source: Ellen Beck (2004): E-Records Key to Better Healthcare, United Press International, January 28, Washington, http://www.us.cgey.com/news/eprints/UPI_012804.pdf).

10. MEDLINE® (Medical Literature, Analysis, and Retrieval System Online) is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains over 12 million references, covering 1966 to the present, to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine from over 4,600 worldwide journals currently in 30 languages. For details, visit the web site http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/medline.html.
PubMed® is also a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) whose primary component is MEDLINE®. In addition, PubMed® provides access to the out-of-scope citations (e.g., articles on plate tectonics or astrophysics), etc. For details visit the web site
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/dif_med_pub.html. Also, PubMed® is searchable via the Internet while MEDLINE® became no longer available on the Internet on or about October 30, 2003.

11. MeSH (Medical Subject Heading) is the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM)'s controlled vocabulary thesaurus. It consists of sets of terms naming descriptors in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity. MeSH descriptors are arranged in alphabetic as well as hierarchical structure. There are 22,568 descriptors in MeSH (2004 edition). MeSH descriptors are organized in 15 categories: category A for anatomic terms, category B for organisms, C for diseases, D for drugs and chemicals etc.
Each category is further divided into subcategories. Within each subcategory, descriptors are arrayed hierarchically from most general to most specific in up to eleven hierarchical levels. Frank B. Rogers, then NLM director, introduced it in 1960. For details, visit the web site http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh.

12. Aragonda, 25 kms north west of Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh. The Aragonda project, as it is called, connects Apollo Chennai, Hyderabad and Aragonda, catering to the health care needs of about 50,000 villagers. Visit also http://www.adb.org/Documents/Events/2001/ICT/theme3_HRD_health_
Sreddy.pdf.

13. It is a relational database of rare diseases and orphan drugs
(so-called as sponsors are reluctant to develop them due to very limited market) for the general public. Initiated on 1 January 1997 by the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and French Government Health Department (DGS), the online database was made available to the public on 1 January 1998. It contains information on 1,150 out of six to seven thousand rare diseases. A disease is called rare if it affects one person per 2,000. For details, visit the Web site http://orphanet.infobiogen.fr or http://www.orpha.net.

14. They are all robotic surgical systems. (a) The da Vinci® surgical system is claimed to be the first totally “intuitive” laparoscopic surgical robot in existence. It has been developed by Intuitive Surgical, Inc., Sunnyvale,CA (http://www.intuitivesurgical.com/) (Laparoscopy is a surgical procedure through the abdominal wall for small-scale surgery), (b) A Swiss-invented robotic physical therapy machine developed by Hocoma AG (http://www.hocoma.ch/) (c) The first robot approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for surgery developed by Computer Motion, Inc., Santa Barbara, CA (http://www.computermotion.com), now merged with
Intuitive Surgical, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA (http://www.intuitivesurgical.com) since June 30, 2003. It became first commercially available medical robot in 1993, (d) A medical robot developed by the Surgical Robotics Lab of Charitè Berlin, the largest and most modern university clinic in Europe (http://www.charite.de/srl), and (e) A surgical robotic system developed by Computer Motion, Inc. that consists of an ergonomic surgeon control console and three table-mounted robotic arms, which perform surgical tasks and provide visualization during endoscopic surgery (http://www.computermotion.com/productsandsolutions
/products/zeus/index.cfm).

15. (a) A call centre (0845 4647) of the National Health Service (NHS) of the United Kingdom offering 24-hour nurse advice and health information (http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/),

(b) A for-profit consumer Web site that operates, among others, online forums for depressed patients in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom (http://www.netdoktor.com),

(c) A database of National Health Service (NHS) of United Kingdom accessible only to registered professional users. It is not accessible to public. It contains information on poisoning and its management for over 14,000 products (http://www.spib.axl.co.uk/),

(d) Launched in January 2001, WebSurg® is a virtual surgical university
providing free online training in surgery in more than 100 operative
techniques to the surgical community. It originates from a research
program of the European Institute of TeleSurgery (EITS) in Strasbourg,
France (http://www.websurg.com), and

(e) Initiated in 1997 by Department of Oncology, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland, it is a Web-based system for individualised survival estimation in breast cancer (http://www.primed.helsinki.fi/finprog).(Source: Silber, Denise (2003): The Case for eHealth, Maastricht, the Netherlands, European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA)(http://www.eipa.nl). Presented at the European Commission’s first high-level conference on eHealth, May 22/23, 2003. Available: http://europa.eu.int/information_society/eeurope/ehealthconference/2003
/doc/thecaseforehealth.pdf).

16. Apollo Hospitals. Apollo’s telemedicine network is currently spread
over 33 locations in India and the neighbouring countries. (Source: http://www.telemedicsystems.com/corpsite and http://www.apollohospitals.com).

17. In the project, “ Village-based teledoc field representatives take
diagnostic information from patients using mobile phones that are specially programmed to transmit information over the Internet to a central database. Doctors at the health centre in Faridabad review patient profiles and symptoms, and prescribe medicines and treatment. Packages of specially compounded medicines are then delivered to the field representative, who disburses them to patients. The project uses off-the-shelf technologies and commercially maintained networks.” The project was started by Jiva Institute, a non-governmental organisation founded in 1992, which specialises in health and education. Teledoc is now operating in a few villages, but will cover 30 villages by mid-2004. For further details, visit the Web site http://www.jiva.org.

18. (a) eHealth-Care, New Delhi (http://www.ehealth-care.net) and
http://www.eswasthya.net) (Internet based (eHealth-Care / Card) project in Sirsa district of Haryana for benefiting rural population),

(b) Health Information Systems Programme (HISP), Chennai
(http://www.hispindia.org) (for strengthening information practices within
the primary health care (PHC) sector in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh), and (c) Naujhil Integrated Rural project for Health and Development (NIRPHAD) (http://www.nirphad.org) (for empowering rural women in Mathura district of Uttar Pradesh). As many as 900 projects in 107 countries applied for the Award under six categories: e-government, culture, health, education, e-business, and environment. There are 107 finalists. The final event will take place in Stockholm, Sweden on May 10-13, 2004. For details visit the web site http://www.challenge.stockholm.se.

19. Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) (http://www.isro.org) by the end of 2005. The health satellite – healthsat – will bring down the cost from Rs 15 lakh (US$ 3,300) to Rs 5 lakh (US$ 1,100) per telecentre. The Healthsat project will cost Rs 60 crore (US$ 13 million) to Rs 100 crore (US$ 22 million). (Source: Yahoo! News – India to Use Satellite for Health Care by S.Srinivasan, Associate Press Writer, February 26, 2002, Bangalore).

20. (a) Annually on 7th of April, and (b) Road safety. 1.2 million people die in road accidents around the world every year. (Source: http://www.who.int/entity/world-health-day/2004/en).