Technical Challenges in Providing Remote Health Consultancy Services for the Unreached Community

Insufficient healthcare facilities and unavailability of medical experts in rural areas are the two major reasons that kept the people unreached to healthcare services. Recent penetration of mobile phone and the demand to basic healthcare services, remote health consultancy over mobile phone became popular in developing countries. In this paper, we introduce two such representative initiatives from Bangladesh and discuss the technical challenges they face to serve a remote patient. To solve these issues, we have prototyped a box with necessary diagnostic tools, we call it a "portable clinic" and a software tool, "GramHealth" for managing the patient information. We carried out experiments in three villages in Bangladesh to observe the usability of the portable clinic and verify the functionality of "GramHealth". We display the qualitative analysis of the results obtained from the experiment. GramHealth DB has a unique combination of structured, semi-structured and un-structured data. We are currently looking at these data to see whether these can be treated as BigData and if yes, how to analyze the data and what to expect from these data to make a better clinical decision support.