Case Studies
Rural telemedicine - Nepal
Introduction
A very innovative project at Gerkhutar village has delivered a broadband connection over mountains and dense forest to a remote village 60km from Kathmandu. The potential is that services delivered through the internet VSAT, VLAN, VPN can be a driver to innovation, education and sustainable economic development to the 80% of Nepal’s population that lives in rural areas.
The challenge for the Government of Nepal
Technology certainly has the potential to deliver benefit to these rural communities but to date there is limited progress worldwide. Technology such as connectivity only delivers softwares, but to date there has been no softwares with sufficient benefit to deliver for health. Videoconferencing has been established in many places worldwide at significant expense in localised areas, with many obstacles to widespread deployment as an effective service. This therefore has limited value, as does email, which is not intuitive to use nor practical for a widespread health service. Existing models of telemedicine have therefore not delivered a sustainable service for many reasons.
An online health service solution.
Creating the ability to record a consultation through an online application has the potential to solve the challenge described above. An online service:
- Is immediately delivered with internet access which is available through cheap technologies
- Has low set up costs
- Has very low running costs
- Is automatically updated Can be accessed by many people at the same time
- Does not have to transfer data from one place to another,as it is stored on a central server, so-called “cloud computing”.
- Can drive the access to the Internet delivering other services, making full use of connectivity introduced.
- Can be made to be very secure and confidential.
Meddserve’s online health software service solution
Meddserve has developed on online health software service that mirrors exactly how a specialist should take a history and records images, that delivers a cost effective consultation to anyone connected to the Internet.A person’s medical record is accessed online, an online medical record (OMR), known as Medrecord Online. A full consultation can be carried out online using the clinician information support system (CISS) known as Medsystem Online. This consultation can include a referral to a remote expert to give a diagnosis and advise treatment and is therefore of value to a patient; particularly when the alternative is a long journey to a hospital including accommodation for family members.The online system is intuitive to use and has standard symptom screens that are normally used by doctors to screen for diseases.
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test rural telemedicine