Healthcare in developing countries has always been a major issue. In the Indian subcontinent the healthcare facilities are quite diverse as one travels from major cities to remote locations and to the rural areas. Whatever little healthcare has been possible in rural India is only because of the initiative of the Government or NGOs. No private player is interested to invest in the rural areas because of the possible poor return on investment. In this paper we study how modern ICT in general and cloud computing in particular can be used in the healthcare sector in order to facilitate improved medical services in the rural areas at reduced costs. We argue that cloud services stand as a potential alternative to facilitate rural healthcare information management in terms of cost reduction and resource utilization. At the same time it can improve maintainability and use of up-to-date technologies in the healthcare sector. The main objective of a Cloud based information system is to create secure and state-of-the-art facility to store patient data which can be accessed by the medical professionals and policy makers for disease diagnosis and control. A cloud based information repository system can offer new possibilities, such as easy and ubiquitous access to medical data, and opportunities to utilize the services of medical experts which are otherwise unavailable in rural areas. Here, we propose a cloud based model for building a rural healthcare information system. Design of an overall system along with the functional components is presented and the advantages, open issues and prospects for further improvement of this model is also highlighted.
['Manas Ranjan Patra', 'Rama Krushna Das', 'Rabi Prasad Padhy']
CRHIS: cloud based rural healthcare information system