Design and Implementation of a Cloud based Rural Healthcare Information System Model

Modern information technology is being increasingly used in the healthcare sector with the sole objective of enhancing the availability of improved medical services at a reduced costs. In this context, outsourcing of computation and storage resources using cloud infrastructure has become a potential alternative. Rural healthcare centers can largely benefit from cloud based models in terms of cost reduction and resource utilization. It will not only reduce the development cost but improve the maintainability and adoption of evolving technologies. This can ensure use of up-to-date technologies and skilled technical manpower to manage rural healthcare systems in an effective and efficient manner. A cloud based information system can offer new possibilities, such as easy and ubiquitous access to medical data, and opportunities to utilize the services of medical experts which are otherwise unavailable in rural areas. However, they also raise new risks and challenges with respect to security and privacy aspects. In this paper, we propose a cloud based model for developing a rural healthcare system. We present the overall system architecture along with the functional components and highlight the advantages, open issues and prospects for further improvements of this model.