Micro Health Centre (µHC) A Cloud enabled Healthcare Infrastructure

Abstract

India’s achievements in the field of health have been less than satisfactory and the healthcare delivery at the village level is constrained by lack of healthcare infrastructure, lack of doctors, lack of supply-chain and lack of appropriate monitoring of the existing healthcare infrastructure. This paper describes an innovative and low cost health care infrastructure that can be rapidly rolled out to provide basic healthcare using tele health services. It consists of a standard shipping container converted to a Micro Health Centre (referred to as µHC). It is connected to medical personnel through Internet, to bring much needed preliminary healthcare to those in need and provisions for medical equipments being directly linked to the µHC health cloud. The objective is to equip the Micro Health Centre with basic diagnostic equipments that can be operated by paramedics or interns, along with specialist medical personnel providing expert interventions through remote medical consultation. It can have a network connectivity varying from 256 KBPA (via satellite) to 2 MBPS (via leased line). Furthermore it can be easily transported to remote rural areas as all supply-chains such as trucks, trains, roadways etc are aligned to handling shipping containers. The solution has been rolled out in North India on a research basis. As this healthcare infrastructural solution is easy to transport and rapidly deployable thus it is well suited for war torn areas as well as areas affected by natural disasters.