On-Cloud Healthcare Clinic: An e-health consultancy approach for remote communities in a developing country

Advances in telecommunication and online service solutions help to bridge the digital divide between rural and urban healthcare services, enabling provision of suitable medical diagnosis and treatment consultations. Although applying e-health solutions has brought some positive impact full potential has not yet been realised, especially in regions where expertise is scarce. In this study we develop and evaluate an e-health consultancy system utilizing cloud computing (we so called “On-Cloud Healthcare Clinic”) that enables doctors and healthcare workers to identify and treat non-communicable diseases in rural and remote communities in Bangladesh, a developing nation.Adopting a design science research approach we developed the solution based around stakeholders’ collaborative participation in prototyping and then evaluated the design using focus groups. The cloud-based solution supports doctors in evaluating and diagnosing patients’ data and medical history through intermediary health care workers or community clinics. The design also knowledgeably allows informed decisions on a course of treatment with follow up for remote or underserved communities. Previously unavailable clinical work is thus practically achieved through utilization of the cloud based e-health system, and generalisation of this approach in healthcare management is discussed.