Abstract

Telemedicine, if properly implemented has the potential to deliver medical support to patients in low resource settings such as rural communities in developing countries. Most studies have propagated for a store-and forward communication for telemedicine practices which fail to provide stakeholders with the benefits associated with real time communication. This study proposes a synchronous communication network model that would supplement existing telemedicine practices in developing countries. The findings from the simulation show that synchronous communication can be realized when the QoS policy reserves 80% of the available bandwidth (1024kbps) for teleconsultation although this limits the current data traffic for the other telemedicine practices. Recommendations on how to address this limitation are proposed.