Prof. Gunnar Hartvigsen

University Hospital of Tromsø

Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine

PO BOX 35

9038 Tromso (Tramsoe)

Norway

T.: (047-776)44000049

Fax: (047-776)44580

gunnar@cs.uit.no

University Hospital of TromsØ

The Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine (NST) aims to contribute to a high quality egalitarian health service. Representing a wide range of health, academic and technical backgrounds, the employees contribute to a diverse activity at the Centre. Research is undertaken in order to understand what are the necessary conditions and requirements for implementing telemedicine services, along with what are the organisational, financial, social and medical consequences of such implementation. The Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine also develops practical solutions for the health sector and is a resource and competence centre for all those interested in telemedicine, both nationally and internationally.

The Norwegian Ministry of Health and Social Affairs has acknowledged telemedicine as a legitimate way to deliver health services in Norway and has politically and financially supported development in this area. The Ministry officially opened University Hospital of Tromsø’s (UHT’s) Department of Telemedicine in 1993, and designated it a national competence centre with the stated purpose of co-ordinating telemedicine research and development activity for the nation. August 1, 1996, Norway became the first country to implement an official telemedicine fee schedule making all telemedicine services reimbursable by the national health insurer. By 2001, a range of telecommunications and information technology are implemented in the healthcare sector in Norway.

At the moment, NCT is under consideration to become a WHO Collaborating Centre on telemedicine. As part of the cooperation with the WHO, NCT accomplished a telemedicine fact-finding mission to the Kyrgyz Republic in October 2000.

NCT intends to be a leading figure in investigating new telemedicine applications, but also to continue to develop and strengthen telemedicine as regular, large-scale services for remote areas. The centre’s priority areas are; New Services for Health Networks, Home Care, New Patient Roles, Net-based Education, Information and Advisory Services, International Office and The Future Laboratory.

NCT’s knowledge of the field of telemedicine is based on eight years experience with user driven telemedical services. In this regard, NCT has already developed to be an excellent “test bed” for telemedicine solutions in the large scale, with reference to motivated end users. 

Curricula vitae

Professor Gunnar Hartvigsen is since 1994 Full Professor in Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science, University of Tromsø, Norway. Dr. Hartvigsen is since 1998 Adjunct Professor at the Bodø Graduate School of Business, Bodø, Norway and since 2000 Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian Centre of Telemedicine. He has a D.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Tromsø. Prior to joining the department at the University of Tromsø, he was a Research Fellow at the Bodø Graduate School of Business, Norway. In 1994-5 he was on sabbatical leave at the University of Twente, Faculty of Computer Science, the Netherlands. His research interests include various aspects of distributed systems, distributed artificial intelligence and telemedicine applications, in particular, distributed applications, mobile systems and software agents.  Dr. Hartvigsen’s current research projects include “The Good Room” (GRO) that focuses on home-based caring service. The overall goal in GRO is to create a complete service package for senior citizens at their own homes. At the Norwegian Centre of Telemedicine Dr. Hartvigsen heads the DiPato-project, which through the use of software agents aims at integrating electronic patient record (EPR).  Dr. Hartvigsen has written two books (“The Research Handbook” and “Computer Ethics”) and papers on distributed applications, software agents, adaptive user interfaces, file systems, educational software, knowledge-based systems and intelligent houses.