Practising cloud-based telemedicine in developing countries

• Published in: International journal of electronic healthcare Vol. 7; no. 3; p. 181
• Main Authors: Puustjärvi, Juha, Puustjärvi, Leena
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland 2013
• Subjects: Delivery of Health Care; Developing Countries; Humans; Internet; Physicians; Telemedicine; e–healthcare; telemedicine; isolated communities; developing countries; electronic healthcare; patient–centred healthcare; cloud computing; information therapy; rural areas; healthcare technology; ontologies
• ISSN: 1741-8453
• DOI: 10.1504/IJEH.2013.057407

In industrialised countries, telemedicine has proven to be a valuable tool for enabling access to knowledge and allowing information exchange, and showing that it is possible to provide good quality of healthcare to isolated communities. However, there are many barriers to the widespread implementation of telemedicine in rural areas of developing countries. These include deficient internet connectivity and sophisticated peripheral medical devices. Furthermore, developing countries have very high patients-per-doctor ratios. In this paper, we report our work on developing a cloud-based health information system, which promotes telemedicine and patient-centred healthcare by exploiting modern information and communication technologies such as OWL-ontologies and SQL-triggers. The reason for using cloud technology is twofold. First, cloud service models are easily adaptable for sharing patients health information, which is of prime importance in patient-centred healthcare as well as in telemedicine. Second, the cloud and the consulting physicians may locate anywhere in the internet.