EUROMED-the creation of a telemedical information society

The organisation of information is critical in a society of the future, especially concerning healthcare. The introduction of a new standard called "Virtual Medical Worlds" (VMW) provides the potential to organise existing medical information and provide the foundations for its integration into future forms of medical data. If is foreseen that the World Wide Web will become the most important communication medium of any future information society. VMW, devised by the EUROMED Project, is therefore based on the combination of the use of the WWW and all its well-defined tools, and the newly emerging medical imaging standard DICOM 3.0, VMW utilises the WWW as a navigational medium to remotely access medical information and explicitly DICOM 3.0 medical images. Physical locations of medical information are abstracted, presenting the practitioner with a user-friendly 3D graphical interface based on medical models. The first version of VMW, referred to as VMW 10.0, is an attempt to define an information infrastructure in an emerging telemedical information society.