icegov2012 proceedings

CRHIS: Cloud based Rural Healthcare Information System
Manas Ranjan Patra
Berhampur University
Berhampur 760 007, India
+91 – 94371-45430
mrpatra12@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Healthcare in developing countries has always been a major issue.
In the Indian subcontinent the healthcare facilities are quite
diverse as one travels from major cities to remote locations and to
the rural areas. Whatever little healthcare has been possible in
rural India is only because of the initiative of the Government or
NGOs. No private player is interested to invest in the rural areas
because of the possible poor return on investment. In this paper
we study how modern ICT in general and cloud computing in
particular can be used in the healthcare sector in order to facilitate
improved medical services in the rural areas at reduced costs. We
argue that cloud services stand as a potential alternative to
facilitate rural healthcare information management in terms of
cost reduction and resource utilization. At the same time it can
improve maintainability and use of up-to-date technologies in the
healthcare sector. The main objective of a Cloud based
information system is to create secure and state-of-the-art facility
to store patient data which can be accessed by the medical
professionals and policy makers for disease diagnosis and control.
A cloud based information repository system can offer new
possibilities, such as easy and ubiquitous access to medical data,
and opportunities to utilize the services of medical experts which
are otherwise unavailable in rural areas. Here, we propose a cloud
based model for building a rural healthcare information system.
Design of an overall system along with the functional components
is presented and the advantages, open issues and prospects for
further improvement of this model is also highlighted.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.3.5 [Information Systems]: Information Storage and Retrieval
- Online Information Services, data sharing, web- based services.
General Terms
Management, Design, Experimentation
Keywords
Cloud computing, Rural Healthcare, Information Services, IaaS.
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ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Rama Krushna Das
National Informatics Centre
Berhampur 760 004, India
+91 – 94370-64536
ramdash@yahoo.com
402
Rabi Prasad Padhy
Oracle Corporation
Bangalore, 560029, India
+91-98862-86444
rabi.padhy@gmail.com
1. INTRODUCTION
Rural healthcare has been the primary mandate of different
political parties in India. Attempts have been made to extend
modern healthcare facilities to the large population living in the
rural areas of the Indian subcontinent. But the ground realities are
far from expectation. The major impediments are due to the
inaccessibility of the remote locations and unavailability of
facilities. Because of this even doctors are not interested to serve
in those remote and underdeveloped areas of the country. As a
result the patients travel long distances and spend a lot of money
in order to get treatment. But those who cannot afford leave it to
their fate and simply depend on the treatment they receive from
the local health workers. Moreover, the rural people are deprived
of modern healthcare facilities like regular health checkups,
clinical tests, proper diagnosis, expert advices etc. This poses a
major challenge even before the scientists and technocrats to
provide affordable solution towards healthcare for the people
living in rural areas. Now with the proliferation of computers and
internet connectivity it is possible to think of ICT enabled
solutions to the healthcare related problems in rural India. Of late,
even in developing countries cloud based services have been
explored as a possible technological solution to large scale
information management though there have been implementation
challenges and cost based issues [1]. In spite of criticisms with
respect to ownership, cost benefit, risk and security issues [2]
several initiatives are already underway to adopt cloud based
solutions to a myriad of applications. The opportunities to
improve healthcare services using cloud infrastructure has been
envisaged in [3]. Cloud based patient record keeping system
proposed in [4][5] is an innovative area in the field of healthcare
which can enable doctors to view patient health records from
anywhere and at any time in order to provide expert advises and
monitor treatment. Some advanced applications like management
of medical image data in a cloud computing environment which
can be accessed through handheld mobile devices has been
proposed in [6]. The possibility of real time health monitoring and
analysis of patient data has been propounded in [7] for ECG data.
The use of sensors to gather patient data and uploading to a cloud
environment for further analysis has been introduced in [8].
Similarly, a smart card enabled patient record keeping system has
been proposed in [9].
In this paper, we investigate how cloudy computing can provided
affordable solution to many of the problems encountered in rural
healthcare services. Several dimensions of rural healthcare are
investigated and the prospects of sharing resources in term of
infrastructure, software and applications to facilitate healthcare
related data processing is explored.