The Italian engineering company D’Appolonia S.p.A. started trials of maritime telemedicine onboard passenger ships a few years ago, connecting the vessels with medical centres ashore. The promising results of these trials led D'Appolonia to continue the activities within several others Telemedicine projects, setting up a team including telemedicine tool developer and satellite carrier provider, aiming at validating the service in day-to-day clinical practice with the fundamental partnership of insurance companies, which are currently integrating telemedicine services within their packages. OPTESS is a market validation project for the evaluation of the services extended to the offshore industry, within a pilot case, which includes two installations on board offshore platforms, one in the North Sea and one in the Mediterranean Sea. The main actors in this project are: a group of insurance companies with call centres available 24 hours a day; a group of public radio medical advice centres, already providing support via radio advice to merchant vessels and remote sites; a system integrator dealing with all technical aspects and interfacing with all the suppliers, including the satellite bandwidth provider. Specialist hospitals are also included in the project, already equipped with broadband telecommunication facilities and with telemedicine systems. The medical services that will be provided to offshore population (through the physicians present in the call centres and the specialists in the hospitals) will include: telecardiology; teleradiology; ultrasound examinations: sending of the video output of the ultrasound system to the specialised center where is a physician able to help the on board staff to perform this kind of exams correctly; videoconference for general teleconsultation, using available systems in order to create the "physical" interactions between the on board physicians and the specialist on land; monitoring of vital signs using different equipment. The person in charge of supervising health safety onboard will be able to ask for a second opinion, anytime it could be necessary (both for an “everyday” problem or for an emergency). In case of emergency, for example, the problem may be solved directly onboard and the sick worker may have to be landed only if strictly necessary. Moreover this system will provide rig medics with the possibility of undertaking examination and assessment of patients with a doctor observing using video conferencing, allowing individual workers to have their certificate of fitness to work being undertaken whilst actually off-shore.