Title: Practising cloud-based telemedicine in developing countries

Authors: Juha Puustjärvi; Leena Puustjärvi

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 68, 00014 Helsinki, Finland ' The Pharmacy of Kaivopuisto, Neitsytpolku 10, 00140 Helsinki, Finland

Abstract: In industrialised countries, telemedicine has proven to be a valuable tool for enabling access to knowledge and allowing information exchange, and showing that it is possible to provide good quality of healthcare to isolated communities. However, there are many barriers to the widespread implementation of telemedicine in rural areas of developing countries. These include deficient internet connectivity and sophisticated peripheral medical devices. Furthermore, developing countries have very high patients-per-doctor ratios. In this paper, we report our work on developing a cloud-based health information system, which promotes telemedicine and patient-centred healthcare by exploiting modern information and communication technologies such as OWL-ontologies and SQL-triggers. The reason for using cloud technology is twofold. First, cloud service models are easily adaptable for sharing patients health information, which is of prime importance in patient-centred healthcare as well as in telemedicine. Second, the cloud and the consulting physicians may locate anywhere in the internet.

Keywords: telemedicine; cloud computing; information therapy; patient-centred healthcare; ontologies; developing countries; isolated communities; rural areas; healthcare technology; e-healthcare; electronic healthcare.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEH.2013.057407

International Journal of Electronic Healthcare, 2013 Vol.7 No.3, pp.181 - 204

Published online: 01 Nov 2013 *

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