Friendship NGO hospital boat in Bangladesh;
Credit: Friendship Bangladesh
The Luxembourg government and SES Techcom, a 100% subsidiary of SES, have confirmed that they have launched the second phase of the SATMED telemedicine project which will be extended until 2024.
Activated by satellite, SATMED connects doctors and nurses based in remote external medical facility locations around the world, providing access to the platform's cloud applications for online training, virtual consultations, medical data management and storage, as well as video conferencing.
Developed in Luxembourg, the platform has been deployed since 2014 in ten locations in Africa and Asia, in partnership with NGOs. Since the Ebola virus outbreak in 2014, it has helped improve health care in countries such as Niger, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Benin and Bangladesh. More recently, SATMED has played a crucial role in supporting COVID-19 working groups, including at an isolated hospital in Sierra Leone and in close cooperation with the NGO German Doctors, as well as floating hospitals in remote areas of Bangladesh through the Friendship NGO. Since the start of the pandemic, more than 73,000 patients have benefited from Friendship hospitals.
The new SATMED agreement between the Luxembourg government and SES will further improve accessibility to health care for all, by supporting health professionals via telemedicine tools in resource-poor areas, in accordance with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. After consolidating the platform in cooperation with NGOs, SATMED has proven itself in the field and is now ready to be scaled up. It will thus be at the service of more users, through cooperation with government institutions, multilateral health agencies and civil society actors, to support their regional development programmes and humanitarian operations.
The main objective of SATMED is to contribute to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 3: good health and well-being, through quality e-health services allowing better access to safe and affordable health care for all, through efforts to strengthen national health systems, to combat the spread of communicable diseases, with a focus on maternal and child health, including sexual and reproductive health and rights. This objective is aligned with the Luxembourg development cooperation strategy, "The road to 2030" and the intention to mobilise the expertise of the private sector to create an impact on development.
Deployed by SES Techcom, SATMED connectivity is provided by the SES satellite fleet, while cloud applications and encrypted backups are hosted in a secure data facility in the EU. The service also includes a helpdesk, the supply of satellite terminals and continuous user training.
"The Luxembourg telemedicine platform SATMED has been providing crucial support to health professionals since the Ebola virus epidemic in 2014, and continues to do so during the COVID-19 crisis", said Franz Fayot, Luxembourg's Minister of Cooperation and of Humanitarian Action. "Telemedicine is an important element of Luxembourg Cooperation's strategic thinking to seize the opportunities offered by digitisation in this area, in particular to support regional development programmes and humanitarian operations. Today's expansion is very timely: reliable connectivity and cloud telemedicine tools are needed for dedicated COVID-19 work teams, but they are also essential for the continuity of other important health services such as remote medical consultations, surgeries, X-ray data processing and much more.”
“Our close collaboration with partners allows us to continuously develop the platform, in order to maximise its benefits for end users. Recent developments in SATMED software will make their jobs even easier, as we introduce new interoperable applications and standardization in line with internationally recognised medical data classifications and processing. To deliver SATMED and its cloud applications to remote locations, we leverage SES 'most advanced state-of-the-art capabilities for satellite broadband services,” said Alan Kuresevic, Managing Director of SES Techcom.
