Welcome to the French world of
Paediatric Cardiology

This site provides information for professionals involved in the care of children with cardiac heart defect in French-speaking communities. The original idea came from two paediatric cardiologists, Dr Anne-Marie Rossignol and Dr Alain Cloutier, leading a collaborative project between two university hospitals in Grenoble and Quebec City, and has the financial support of the French and Quebec governments.

The objective of such collaboration is to introduce the information technology as a tool for the university hospitals' missions of care, teaching and research.

Distance diagnosis by transmission of echocardiography in real time and the capability to interact with the technicians, physicians and parents offers new perspectives in health care organisation. The Quebec experience remains a model of a large telemedicine network involving 32 regional hospitals and 4 university hospitals. The Grenoble experience offers an example of data transmission and networking for the Rhône-Alpes region. Now that we can avoid the transfer of patients for proper diagnosis, health care professionals are asked to take care of children that were previously investigated and treated in large centres. Therefore, this collaborative project not only intends to promote the use of distance diagnosis and share experiences, but will also develop tools that will support health care professionals, particularly in regional centres, for their patient care.

This site is one of the tools used to achieve our goals. The following three parts are already being developed:

• The Normal Heart and Its Investigation section covers the normal anatomy and the echocardiographic approach. Information on other investigation tools will be developed.
• The Cardiac Malformations section offers a description of many congenital heart defects with their presentation, associated lesions and the therapeutic approach to consider in the context of distance diagnosis. Echocardiographic description are presented according to the axis, and short sequences are available for most of them.
• A list of paediatric cardiology services and physicians in the French-speaking community is under progress in the last section.

Further sections will be added to promote discussions and to provide learning materials and a lot of other information for the benefit of children having congenital heart defects.

Your ideas and comments are welcome. Please feel free to e-mail them to us and to follow our progress.

Dr Christine Houde and Dr Anne-Marie Rossignol