Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2. BACKGROUND
The overall merits of an RFID-backed com-
munity healthcare solution is to enable easy and
reliable identification of individual patients,
maintain more accurate and consistent medical
records and, most important of all, facilitate better
healthcare out-reach and enhance the quality of life
for the individuals in communities remote from
the central medical facility. In addition, it can also
help to relieve the loading pressure on the central
medical facility when it is overcrowded and can
increase revenue opportunities by broadening the
addressable base of patients to more remote loca-
tions. It may also help to improve the efficiency
of the central medical facility to focus resource
on the more specialized medical cases.
This project implements a real-time electronic
individual identification and tracking system for
rural healthcare. The system is planned upon in-
ternational standards, defining public health in vil-
lages, allowing for trauma and emergency as well
as disease response, control and studies, clinical
healthcare, disease surveillance and prevention.
Section 2 provides some background on health-
care challenges in developing countries, while the
description IEEE HTC challenges are given in
section 3 with emphasis on individual identifica-
tion and records keeping. Applicable technologies
are discussed in section 4. Section 5 describes the
field test in India, with target areas, objectives,
and technology solution outline. Healthcare and
eHealth provisions in India are surveyed in section
6, offering an availability assessment. Solution
implementation details are listed in section 7,
with technology items embedded within a solution
framework. A comprehensive economic analysis
is given in section 8 emphasizing both evaluation
methods and practical models, while redressing
the case for developing countries and this project
in particular. With practical implementation still
in progress, section 9 offers an implementation
feasibility study illustrated by a simplified case
example. Finally, discussions and conclusions are
drawn in section 10.
If developed countries deal nowadays with equity
in health and healthcare, most developing, less
developed or low-income countries face other
types of difficulties regarding health services. In
these countries, far too many people have to deal
with inadequate nighttime lighting or inadequate
communication due to lack of reliable electricity;
too many healthcare providers are forced to treat
patients without having access to databases of
past results and new research trends and a large
number of people die from easily treatable diseases
because of inadequate health records.
Health has always been a central concern for
individuals, groups, communities or the global
society and the importance of health cuts across
individual of all ages and across all societies. In
the 20th century we witnessed an extraordinary
progress on health, but progress in health is fragile
(The Global Agenda, 2009).
Understanding the challenges of health and
of the social response to health problems is dif-
ficult. Therefore, the global community tried to
set a number of critical goals for development,
the Millennium Development Goals. Three of
these are health-related: MDG4 - reducing child
mortality, MDG5- reducing maternal mortality
and MDG6 - reducing major diseases (HIV/
AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria). These MDGs have
generated endless policy discussions and focus in
many settings.
Although real progress has been made, the
agenda for global health is much broader than the
MDGs. Therefore there is a worldwide lack of co-
herence in global health governance, which leads
to the impossibility of effective representation
throughout the globe. The institutional efficiency,
mandates, activities, authority and even resources
allocated for the global health initiatives show
clearly that there is no agreed plan or strategic
vision to tackle the major health problems across
the world. And given the diversity of the deter-
minants that make up the healthcare worldwide,
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