ICT Enablers and Strategies to Enhance Rural Health Research

This paper, written for the Universiti Putra, Malaysia, and presented at the First International Conference on Rural Medicine (ICORM 2007), "posits the need for proper preliminary studies to be conducted before embarking on information and communication technology (ICT) especially for rural health enhancement..." in Malaysia. It argues for an outcome integrating "knowledge and structural capability and capacity, through technology, which is geared towards developing sustainable socio-medical-economic health and well-being of rural communities."

According to these authors, the people, their community structure and ecology, and the identification of the relevant knowledge content are central to operationalising ICT policy, integration, and functionalities. The authors advocate for community processes of cooperation, partnership, and networking of communication tools and a server system set-up. They explore this possibility and discuss its possible structure and function, including "infrastructures and info-structures (contents), primers, drivers, and enablers."

The paper discusses the ICT environment in Malaysia and prior ICT health-related projects. It recognises indigenous medicinal knowledge as a "bio-information-rich rural setting" which has not been fully documented. It suggests the indexing of communities to calculate their "e-readiness" for technological health solutions and then charts strategies for the future.

Its first recommendation is a preparatory learning phase in which a community would develop technological skills to enable them to become invested in ICT. Community participation - making local citizens the major stakeholders, and, thus, accountable for the development of the use of ICT for economic and health-related local development - is the ideal expressed here. "Hence the peoples’ beliefs, psycho-social attributes, and adaptability etiquette need to align well with changing life’s habits and practices associated with the value chain of ICT-enabled way of life."

The document identifies content as "[d]ata, [i]nformation, [k]nowledge and their applications." The authors suggest that initially rural people map out their information and knowledge needs; and then research priorities align with these. The authors envisage this research transformed into knowledge and ICT applications that form a content repository with user accessibility, navigation, and function that results in a seamless sharable, collaborative, and 'federated' system with stations placed in rural clusters, research centres, and centres of learning. This includes a taxonomy that integrates scientific and non-scientific information. It also includes: cost-effectiveness, community sharing, aligning of user application with delivery system, user-friendly technology, technology primers and drivers, and connectivity and delivery components.

The ICT development of Malaysia has, as stated here, penetrated most rural areas. The authors see opportunity in the "widespread use of info-structure portals such as 'myHealth' by the rural people... [as] the backbone of rural health care...[which] can be expanded to include higher and more intelligent-engines and smart user-interface functionalities such as expert systems and animated-visual-images repository, and e-Diagnosis and e-Health Intelligence". They envisage a federal lead role in moving forward in extending infrastructure and infostructure applications to rural constituents, e.g. Lifetime Health Plan (LHP), Mass Customized Personalized Health Information and Education (MCPHIE), Continuing Professional Development of health professionals online Modules, and telehealth and teleconsultation. The authors recommend strategic planning for that extension, using the e-Readiness Index to help with prioritisation of components and regions, and analytical strategies for future implementation. The document concludes with an outline for components of a research matrix for planning further ICT development.

This paper is available electronically via email from Syed T.S. Hassan at the address below.