Design, Development, Deployment of a Telemedicine System in a Developing Country: Dealing with Organizational and Social Issues

Telemedicine means delivering health care services to remote locations by ICT (Information and Communication Technology). Several types of telemedicine systems exist: by this paper, we focus on teleconsulting systems. We report here about a telemedicine project in one of the poorest country worldwide, Burundi. After gathering the requirements, which strongly differ from the requirements of a telemedicine project in a developed country, we designed, implemented, and deployed a prototype aimed at providing local physicians of the Hospital of Ngozi, Burundi, with expert second opinions from their colleagues in the University of Verona, Italy, on interpreting ECG signals, ultrasound and X-ray images. We considered in a seamless way both process- and data-related requirements. Besides the more technical aspects, we also report on some organizational and social issues we faced during the project.