Historical Perspectives of Telemedicine Use in NATO

In 2000, NATO created the Telemedicine Expert Panel (TMED-EP) when few nations had deployed telemedicine systems to support military field operations. This group and its successor the Telemedicine Expert Team (TMED-ET) have been encouraging the nations to deploy telemedicine (TMED) in support of their forces, and have continued developing the doctrine and technical standards which will facilitate the use of TMED within NATO. This has been a highly successful effort, and TMED is increasingly being used within the military medical structures of some NATO and Partnership for Peace (PfP) nations to provide medical care to deployed military personnel. This chapter describes the history and accomplishments of the TMED-EP and ET which include development of Telemedicine Interoperability Standards for use among deployed NATO forces and doctrine to support TMED use. Also discussed are more recent efforts to include NATO sponsored Advanced Research Workshops in 2012 and 2013 to discuss a multi-national telemedicine system to be used in response to disasters involving both NATO and PfP nations, and the follow-on 2015 NATO Science for Peace and Security (SPS) telemedicine project in the Ukraine which demonstrated the potential role of telemedicine in disaster response among NATO nations.