broadband strategies handbook.pdf - Khazar University

Box 1.3: Mobile Health Services in NigeriaIn Nigeria, the government lacked sufficient public health information to allocatehealth care services efficiently to over 800 villages with no primaryhealth care. A public-private partnership, Project Mailafia, was established toalleviate this situation. Project Mailafia sends teams of mobile health careproviders to remote villages, where they treat patients and collect healthdata that support better public health decision making and resource allocation.Mobile health workers collect the data on ruggedized netbooks andtransfer the data to area clinics. The clinics then upload the data to a centraldatabase using Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX)and Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) technologies.Source: Intel 2010.patient information (ITU 2008, 11). As noted in table 1.2, the U.S.-basedCalifornia Broadband Task Force (2008, 6) estimated that telemedicine willrequire speeds between 10 and 100 Mbit/s and that high-definition telemedicinewill require broadband speeds of over 100 Mbit/s. The currentwireline and wireless infrastructure in most countries is insufficient to takeadvantage of the e-health opportunities in the digital economy. This is particularlyimportant for developing countries, where ensuring access to andadoption of wireline and wireless broadband networks would be particularlyuseful for including those who have been left out of more traditionalhealth care models.This happened in Rwanda, where a three-phase e-health project wasdelayed due to lack of high-speed broadband connectivity (Rwirahira 2009).The first phase of the initiative, which established an electronic data storagesystem that permitted three hospitals to share patient information, wascompleted without delay. However, the final two phases, which involvedvideo conferencing and a real-time telemedicine system, were put on holdfor a year until a broadband Internet connection could be established toconnect the three hospitals with a fiber optic cable network (Ndahiro 2010).E-Government Applications: Transforming Government Processesand Improving Citizen ParticipationE-government covers a broad range of applications that can transform governmentprocesses and the ways in which governments connect and interactwith businesses and citizens. This allows citizens to participate in societyand improves the efficiency, accountability, and effectiveness of governmentBuilding Broadband 17