Uganda: ICTs to Improve health in rural areas

Source: Highway Africa News Agency
http://highwayafrica.ru.ac.za
Uganda has entered into a partnership with Portugal, Germany and Kazakhstan among other European countries to introduce a telemedicine project for rural hospitals.

The project referred to as the TeleInViVo project involves the establishment of integrated workstations which use techniques like Internet, ISDN, phone lines, and GSM mobile systems to allow one physician to collect three-dimensional ultra-sound data of a patient and to send this data to another physician who is a specialist in the particular disease that a patient is suffering from.

Telemedicine is the use of Informationand Communication Technologies (ICTs) for medical diagnosis and patient care when the provider and client are separated by distance.

Data transmission can occur online, that is, while both doctors are connected, or offline, for instance, overnight, through narrowband channels.

In the latter case, waiting times are minimized, and whereas in the former case additional scans may be requested by the remote expert during the tele-consultation to hone in on the diagnosis. It includes pathology, radiology, and patient consultation from the distance.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Georgios Sakas of the European Union (EU), told Highway Africa News Agency (HANA) that in Uganda the devices, to be used initially for the project will be at Nakaseke Hospital, a hospital in an isolated, rural area of Uganda and another Mulago Hospital, the biggest hospital in Uganda located in the capital Kampala.

Sakas said this is intended to foster communication between physicians who specialize in certain diseases and physicians who work in isolated areas such as islands, rural areas, and crisis situation areas in Uganda.

The purpose of this program is to improve general health services in Nakaseke Hospital as well as to garner access for health workers to medical support from colleagues across the country. A larger goal is to reduce referral from Nakaseke to Mulago Hospital, he said.

Currently, the Nakaseke Hospital has no telephone lines and is completely isolated by both distance and communication channels from other health centers.

Doctors from the Mulago Medical School have been trained to spear head this project - they have in turn trained a number of doctors from Nakaseke and Mulago Hospital.

According to the partners who include, the Portuguese Hospitais da Universidade de Coimbra, the Hospital de Ponta Delgada of Portugal, UNESCO Paris, France and Computer Graphics Center (ZGDV) in Darmstadt, Germany, this project will be built and tested in other African countries with similar socio-economic conditions like Uganda.

It will be later be adjusted to meet the needs of developing countries and countries in transition. It currently comes in two versions: a fully portable, self-contained device, and a workstation version (a PC attached to an ultrasound scanner for internal hospital use).

A fixed station for expert diagnosis support will be situated at the Coimbra University Hospital in Portugal. The field test sites include Azores and Canary Islands; UNESCO will evaluate EU-TeleInViVo in Uganda and Kazakhstan at two different sites for each country.

By the time of the project's completion, it is hoped that a medical tele-conference emergency workstation will be available in Europe as well as in other regions of the world that provide health care services to underserved areas like ecological disaster areas, remote rural areas, and isolated islands.