Doing more with less: Reviving Public Health Services through IoT & Cloud Apps in Developing World

Despite some developing economies breaking all records of economic growth, they are still not able to align greater portion of their GDP toward Public Health Services. While the current state of Public Heath can be partly attributed to lack of governance, bureaucratic delays, policy paralysis and other capital intensive & pressing priorities however to an extent it is also due to growing cost of healthcare and lack of expert healthcare services reach in class B & C cities & other remote regions.

Without getting into political debate, thought leaders are sketching plans to revive public healthcare services through advancement in Information Technologies. While there are multiple dimension in which technology can play a role to solve this onerous problem however biggest role of technology should be to increase the reach of expert services most efficiently at optimized cost.

While telemedicine has been around for some time however advent of IoT & Cloud has infused new hope to the overall idea of providing public health services effectively & efficiently.

All thanks to IoT / IoE, now patients in critical conditions can be remotely monitored through real time / near real time feeds. Sensors installed on medical devices can transmit patient vitals & other data and this information can be analyzed by rule engines in combination with patient information available on cloud & results can be presented to specialist / doctors in other locations and enable them make timely decisions.

Maintaining patient information on Cloud brings multiple advantages – it reduces cost of operations (essentially putting less burden on public funds), makes the data accessible from anywhere , any device – essentially making it Omni-present. In this internet age, maintaining patient health record on cloud is an excellent option that public health agencies should definitely consider to provide economical services to their citizens across locations. It can also enable citizens to available public health services from any location without worrying too much historic records as cloud simplifies challenges traditionally associated with integration & accessibility.

Keeping patient information on Cloud would also increase the reach of  public healthcare agencies & enable them run various campaigns ( vaccination programs, health alerts et al) for the benefit of citizens.

This approach has all the right ingredients to scale thanks to abundant compute & storage capacity available on cloud and it allows experts to provide care to patients in diverse geographies. From Public Health Services perspective it enables the governing body to do more with less by spreading the cost across wider population. The advantage of this approach gets further multiplied when the same infrastructure is used to monitor the health of medical devices & other infrastructure components , enabling device owners / manufacturers to monitor device usage , make appropriate suggestions to improve performance of devices and do preventive maintenance – again making Public Health Services more cost efficient & spreading the benefits to wider population.