SES and Luxembourg expand reach of SATMED telemedicine project

SES and the Luxembourg government have reached an agreement to broaden the reach of the SATMED telemedicine project through 2024. Enabled by satellite, SATMED is designed to connect doctors and nurses based in remote locations to the outside medical world, providing access to the platform’s cloud applications for e-training, virtual consultations, management and storage of medical data records, and video conferencing.

This platform has been deployed in 10 locations across Africa and Asia in partnership with NGOs. Recently, SATMED supported Covid-19 response in a remote hospital in Sierra Leone with the NGO German Doctors, and in floating hospitals in remote areas of Bangladesh via NGO Friendship.

The new SATMED agreement between the Luxembourg Government and SES will further broaden the accessibility of healthcare for all through supporting medical professionals in resource-poor areas with telemedicine tools, and in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The SATMED platform is set to scale to serve more users, through cooperation with partnering organizations.

Deployed by SES Techcom as a fully-managed service, SATMED’s connectivity is delivered by the SES satellite fleet, while the cloud applications and the encrypted back-ups are hosted in a secured data facility in the EU.

Speaking about the development, Franz Fayot, Luxembourg Minister for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Affairs, said: “Luxembourg’s SATMED telemedicine platform has been providing critically important support to medical professionals since the Ebola outbreak in 2014, and continues to do so during the Covid-19 crisis. Telemedicine is an important part of Luxembourg Development Cooperation’s strategic thinking of using the possibilities digitalisation offers in this field, particularly to support regional development programmes and humanitarian operations. Today’s extension is extremely timely. Not only are reliable connectivity and cloud telemedicine tools needed by the dedicated Covid-19 task forces, but they also remain key for the continuity of other important health services like consultations with doctors in other locations, surgeries, X-Ray data processing and much more.”

Alan Kuresevic, Managing Director of SES Techcom, added: “Our close working relationship with the partners enable us to constantly develop the platform to maximise its benefits for the end-users. SATMED’s recent software developments will further facilitate their work as we are introducing new interoperable applications and standardisation in line with the internationally recognised classifications and medical data handling. To deliver SATMED and its cloud applications to remote locations, we are leveraging SES’s most advanced industry-leading capabilities for satellite-enabled broadband services.”