SDNP Tele-health System

About 140 million people living within 144,000 sq. km of land, Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world and about 80% of the total population of the country lives in rural areas. With inadequate number of physicians and urban centric mentality of available physicians, telemedicine is the crying demand of the country.

Following statistics will give an overview of the healthcare facilities in the country. There are only 663 Government hospitals in district head-quarters and Thana areas and total number of beds Available in both public and private hospitals and clinics is 43,293 which leave 3,063 persons per hospital bed. Similarly the resultant of population per physician is 4147. Analyzing the above statistics anyone will realize the inadequate healthcare infrastructure in this highly populated country.

Insufficient expert physicians and specialist doctors, absence of proper diagnostic tools, urban centric mentality of available physicians and some other issues made the existing healthcare infrastructure in rural Bangladesh even more vulnerable. Those who can effort, usually travel all the way to the suburbs and cities just for a better treatment from experienced and specialist doctors, which consumes lots of time and cost a lot of money to the patient’s family. When a patient has to visit a suburb or a city to avail a healthcare facility, he/she travels with at list one more person and on an average this visit and treatment process will cost around 1000-1500Tk (US$ 15-23). In a country like Bangladesh, this is a huge burden to them. Hence, in most cases they avoid treatment or take help of the paramedics in the locality. Whereas, with the help of telemedicine service they can save up to 80% of this expenditure and at the same time they can avail even the best treatment available in the country and around the world.

Sometimes, it is not even possible to transfer a patient to the suburb or to the city on time due to his/her critical health condition and poor communication facilities in those areas. With the aid of this Telemedicine, the health care system can be disseminated to the rural Bangladesh and handful number of community can be brought under better healthcare facility.

Using the same infrastructure, existing paramedics and physicians can be trained for providing modern healthcare service to his/her community. Online workshop and online education system can be the means of doing that. Besides capacity building, several online awareness generation workshops can be arranged to improve the general health in those communities. Workshops will cover awareness generation on vaccinations, birth control, precaution of AIDS and child nutrition etc.

Bangladesh being a disaster prone country, it suffers from cyclone, flood, earthquake and many other natural calamities; causing death to many people. But if we pay a closer look to the statistics, we will find that more than 60% of the total loss of life takes place due to post disaster diseases and epidemic breakdowns. In year 2005, the doctors association of Bangladesh had a seminar for evaluating their capacity of managing such catastrophe. They have concluded that they do not have enough expertise and infrastructure for handling such adversity. But making a use of ICT in the monitoring system will make it lot easier to manage and lack of manpower can be overcome by taking advices from centrally available specialists.

Contribution of ICT in enhancing the healthcare system can not be bound with scale. But the implementation plan should be taken in steps.

Direct objective of the project is to Develop, install and implement telemedicine services first time in four regional nodes of SDNP which are located in four different directions of the country. And outcome of the project will make primary healthcare service available to under-served rural communities of those areas; make complex medical care more available, timelier and less costly. It is the future of today’s medical science.