Ontario has spent a decade and more than $1 billion on eHealth — a grand scheme to computerize the health records of everyone in the province.
The result to date: Almost zip.
Malawi, an impoverished country in southeast Africa, has the records of 1.1 million patients in computers that can be accessed by doctors and health professionals in 10 locations around the country. The total cost: $1 million.
But suppose there's no Internet access to relay the images and signals. What if electricity is unreliable or unavailable?
In impoverished rural areas across the globe, that's the reality faced by health workers. For them, hope for telemedicine is more readily found in the spread of cell phone networks and simple text messaging.
Weiterlesen: Malawi: Text service provides more than a Band-Aid for rural health service
The expert, Dr Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, chief executive officer of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organization (CTO), was speaking after meeting with senior staff of Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (Macra) on Tuesday.
Weiterlesen: Malawi urged to develop an aggressive ICT policy
The high-level international conference on Connecting Rural Communities in Africa brings about thirty Information and Communication Technologies ministers, experts, regulators and operators from Africa, Middle and Europe will discuss strategies, business models and technology policies for bridging the digital divide.
Manager for Government Wide Area Network (GWAN) Patrick Machika told the country’s national news agency, Malawi News Agency (Mana) that government in collaboration with the World Bank embarked on the project which will take five years at a cost US$3.2 million.