Portable Health Clinic: An Advanced Tele-Healthcare System for Unreached Communities

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2019 Aug 21:264:616-619. doi: 10.3233/SHTI190296.

Abstract

The Portable Health Clinic (PHC) system endeavors to take healthcare facilities along with remote doctors' consultancy to the doorsteps of the unreached people using an advanced telemedicine system. Thus, the necessity of having physical healthcare peripheries specially in the developing countries can be mitigated. The PHC system promotes preventive healthcare by encouraging regular health checkups so that diseases can be prevented as well as their severity can be mitigated, leading to a reduction on healthcare expenses. Thus, the number of patients along with excessive workload on existing healthcare human resources can be minimized. The current project in rural Bangladesh alone has served more than 41,000 people so far by the PHC system and a simple analysis of this data shows some significant findings on regional health status. A simple expansion of this program, covering a wider service area, can produce a big data to reflect the whole country's health profile.

Keywords: Preventive Healthcare; Telemedicine; Triage.

MeSH terms

  • Ambulatory Care Facilities
  • Bangladesh
  • Delivery of Health Care*
  • Developing Countries
  • Humans
  • Telemedicine