Current Services

Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) of Bangladesh funded by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), started its journey of Telemedicine back in January, 2003. In its 1st phase, a 15 months long “e-Health & Learning” (e-HL) project was organized by Sustainable Development Programme (SDNP), which was partially funded by the European Commission under the Asia IT&C programme. The project was jointly coordinated by the Centre for Research of applications of telematics to organization and society (CRATOS) of catholic university in Italy, University of Birmingham in UK and Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) in Bangladesh worked as partner. During that phase several workshops and seminars were held locally and internationally. Eight seminars were also delivered to Physicians in Dhaka and Mymensing in Bangladesh.

The project has built two network segments using point-to-point radio link with a bi-directional bandwidth of 2 Mbps. The first setup of the segment was in Dhaka and it connected the SDNP node at BIDS with the Comfort Nursing Home, covering an air distance of about 8 km. The second one was established from SDNP node in Mymensingh (120 km away from Dhaka) to a Community Based Medical College and Hospital (CBMCH), about 6 km away from Mymensingh node, creating a length of 134 km (including existing 120 km of SDNP backbone) of radio link with 4 hops in between.

There are 4 other regional nodes of SDNP Bangladesh present at 4 different parts of Bangladesh, i.e. Cox's Bazar, Dinajpur and Satkhira. These nodes are directly connected to the satellite through own VSAT and thus connected to the head office as well as to the rest of the world through Internet. Using this most suitable infrastructure SDNP Bangladesh has already taken initial steps towards implementing telemedicine service.

As a follow up of the telemedicine initiative in Bangladesh, SDNP Bangladesh has started telemedicine sessions from early August 2005. The project is arranging weekly telemedicine sessions for under-served and underprivileged people of rural Bangladesh since then using its own infrastructure, limited equipments and manpower. These sessions included real patients at the remote end and one specialist physician or a medical expert at the SDNP head office end at BIDS to provide his suggestions.
At this moment, SDNP Bangladesh is conducting telemedicine sessions in all regional nodes using its own network backbone. Weekly two days (Friday and Saturday) are allocated for these sessions.

A real time video conferencing is arranged between the patient and the physician. Before the due date of the session a brief complain record is collected from the patient using a predefined format. These details are sent to SDNP head office before the due date of the session. A specialist physician is invited to the SDNP head office to conduct the session. The physician at headquarter receives the complain documents before the session teleconference starts and prepare his questions.

At the video conferencing, patients are asked few questions by the physician and answers are received. Then the Physicians in both ends discuss the case study between them and deliver the appropriate medical suggestion to the patient. Some of them are called for follow up sessions to monitor the medication. These physicians are giving voluntary consultation for the under privileged people of rural areas of Bangladesh. But with the proposed system SDNP Bangladesh is looking forward to give an institutional structure to this service and required measure will be taken for that.

These phenomenon, will continue (on every Friday & Saturday) for all nodes of SDNP Bangladesh; Cox's Bazar, Dinajpur, Mymensingh, Satkhira, Fulpur, Haluaghat and Tala by rotation.

The system in still in its preliminary stage and there are enormous provision for including new technologies to enhance the existing system. Sooner SDNP will introduce different telemedicine devices & different Digital Medical Equipments which will make the diagnosis system more robust with electronic medical records. Then a more comprehensive healthcare system would be introduced to the under-served community of rural Bangladesh.