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Introduction Architecture Intelligent Prescription System Rural Data Capture Critical Alert Engine Solution Positioning Value Addition

What is Rural Data Capture (RDC) ?
Indian hospitals organize Village of the Month programs in which, doctors and health officials choose a specific village for survey and collect key health-related parameters from the villagers. Such data collected from villages have to be consolidated and acted upon. The key challenge that the doctors and the health officials face in this process, is the maintenance of health records and prescriptions, for future retrieval and analysis.

Rural Data Capture (RDC) helps the hospital to capture key information about the health conditions of people from remote, rural villages and analyze the data more intelligently and efficiently.RDC entails the use of a Pocket PC to gather data during surveys in villages. A medical official is presented with a simple and easy-to-use interface on the handheld Pocket PC, using which he/she can quickly fill out certain key details for each rural patient they screen. This data is stored locally in the Pocket PC, and is synchronized offline with the main database in batch mode. The data collected is later aggregated and mined to extract descriptive information about the health conditions of a village, and to take suitable preventive or corrective measures against specific diseases in the area.

RDC System Design

RDC System Design

The RDC System possesses a two-tier architecture viz. the PocketPC Front End and the Hospital Back-End. These components are explained below:

  1. PocketPC Front End:
    This component of RDC is built as consisting of the following three sub-components:

    1. RDC Data Capture Interface: The RDC Data Capture Interface provides the necessary UI to gather indicative rural patient data. A convenient tabbed interface, this boasts of optimal use of the limited real estate available on the PocketPC. Screen shots of the RDC Data Capture Interface obtained on a PocketPC Emulator are shown below:

      RDC Data Capture Interface in Action: Personal Details Tab            RDC Data Capture Interface in Action: Related Details Tab

      RDC Data Capture Interface in Action: Habit Details Tab            RDC Data Capture Interface in Action: Medical History Tab

    2. Rural Data SQL Server CE Database: The Rural Data SQL Server CE Database is an efficient local store on the PocketPC, of the information obtained on the RDC Data Capture Interface. It comprises a single table called RuralData with a schema suited to store indicative rural patient data. SQL Server CE makes application development easy while providing a consistent development model and API. It is also a robust, feature-rich mobile database solution with a relatively small footprint. It includes a query processor, merge-replication and synchronization capabilities.

    3. SyncRDC XML Web Service Client: In order that the patient data stored in the Rural Data SQL Server CE Database be meaningfully analyzed and subsequent treatment to villagers be provided, it is necessary that this data be synchronized with the Patient Information System of the hospital. RDC provides a mechanism for this purpose through a simple XML Web Service made available on the hospital server (as we shall discuss soon). The SyncRDC Web Service Client is a client of this XML Web Service and runs on the PocketPC. In batch mode, the PocketPC can dial up to the Internet, make a call to the XML Web Service running in the hospital servers and upload the rural patient data.

  2. Hospital Back-End:
    This component of RDC is built as consisting of the following two sub-components:

    1. Sync RDC XML Web Service: As mentioned earlier, RDC provides a XML Web Service based solution for synchronizing rural patient data gathered on the PocketPC with the Hospital Patient Information System. Sync RDC XML Web Service is the XML Web Service which runs on the hospital server and enables the PocketPC to upload the rural patient data.

    2. Hospital SQL Server Database: The Hospital SQL Server Database is persistent store at the hospital site which houses the data for the Patient Information System. The rural patient data obtained from the PocketPC is stored in this database for further analysis by the doctors. Once the data is analysed, suitable treatment is offered to the villagers.

Summary
Thus RDC helps the hospital to capture indicative rural patient data in a simple and quick manner. The locally stored data is easily synchronized with the Hospital Patient Information System through a XML Web Service. The data collected is saved to persistent storage for further analysis and suitable treatment is offered to the villagers. The data can also be mined to gauge the overall health conditions of a village or presence of regional diseases etc and appropriate preventive or corrective measures can be taken.



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