2017 ICT4D Conference

Telemedicine is emerging as the solution to bridge this access gap by connecting urban doctors & rural patients via mobile phone & low bandwidth internet connections. Health systems who would like to enter into the telemedicine space have a limited number of technology platform options that are opensource & work in resource constrained low bandwidth environments. The current solutions also have limited functionality and lack the ability to provide appropriate clinical support for health workers to provide high quality comprehensive care. In telemedicine the doctor is remote & relies on a local community health worker (CHW) to collect necessary information needed to make a diagnosis & prescribe treatment. However, the CHW often lacks the necessary skills, training, confidence & experience. This results in poorer quality of information being sent & impacts the doctor’s ability to arrive at a diagnosis. Our team has built a telemedicine platform that overcomes the gaps of existing solutions and is designed to work in these challenging last mile settings.



Intelehealth is an open source telemedicine platform that empowers community health workers (CHWs) to facilitate tele-consultations with remote doctors by enabling the CHWs to gather high quality clinical history and conduct clinically relevant physical exams. Intelehealth aims to improve the quality of care delivered over telemedicine by capturing the knowledge & experience of a doctor in a mobile app through a complex clinical decision support system. Intelehealth is built on top of OpenMRS, an opensource enterprise medical record system. Intelehealth allows private sector health systems, global development organizations, NGOs & governments to expand the reach of their services to ensure that comprehensive care reaches rural populations.



The platform was developed at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design. In this session we present how we designed the system using the Principles of Digital Development, learnings from a pilot & provide a demo.