International remote surgery or remote medical consultations is a part of telemedicine that has long intrigued medical professionals. While conceptually easy to grasp, the actual implementation of international telemedicine has faced several challenges, not least of which is how to set up the network connections between medical facilities in each country.
As demand grows for this type of service and more healthcare professionals gain experience and confidence in telemedicine, more of the barriers are falling. At TMF Digital Transformation World, I’ll join a group of telecommunications experts that will demonstrate a solution to the issue of setting up the network connectivity needed for these services.
Recently, I was part of a team at Amartus that developed an Intercarrier Settlement Platform using Blockchain technology. This platform allows service providers to automate and optimize several important business aspects of intercarrier reconciliation and settlement, and also provides support in resolving disputes that are an inherent part of the process. Automating these settlement issues is an important step towards the vision of autonomous networks. This solution is a mature product implemented in accordance with the standardized layered architecture model developed by IEEE Corporate Member Blockchain Engineering Council.
Skynet – Intercarrier Settlement for Remote Medical Consultancy
Amartus was glad to join the TMF Catalyst Skynet to demonstrate the Intercarrier Settlement Platform in the context of 5G network slicing as defined by ETSI and also to promote the usage of the MEF LSO 3.0 API: Sonata and Cantata and a federated orchestration architecture.
To facilitate this service, we collaborated with other Skynet participants including BearingPoint, Ericsson, EXFO, Infosys and Rift. (Click here to see the full list of champions and participants for this catalyst).
A great example of such an application of Intercarrier Settlement Platform is the medical consultancy use case that is a part of Skynet. It calls for a 5G-enabled remote medical service provided between hospitals in Japan and United Kingdom. To provide a guaranteed quality of service, a 5G network slice needs to be ordered, provisioned and reconciled.
Skynet is designed to showcase 5G-enabled remote healthcare in a multi-operator orchestrated environment. The objective is to enable a diverse ecosystem of partners including multiple operators from different geographies which seamlessly provide a set of end-to-end hybrid services. Skynet will highlight the importance of business assurance, monetization and the technical maturity of next-gen 5G enabled services. The simplified illustration of supporting architecture is shown in the figure below.
