Development of a Medical Tele-Management System for Post-Discharge Patients of Chronic Diseases in Resource-Constrained Settings

Abstract

Medical tele-management is an emerging field of study in telemedicine that proposes an interactive and proactive disease management approach which combines tele-monitoring and tele-consultation services through an information and communications technology (ICT) supported partnership. On one hand, chronic diseases require frequent and continuous monitoring to avoid complications; on the other hand is the need for a platform where health workers in rural settlements can consult or interact with their counterparts in urban areas to reduce isolation. However, telemedicine systems exist singly either as tele-monitoring or tele-consultation systems or majorly in developed countries with dedicated and adequate ICT resources and infrastructure. This work developed a combined tele-monitoring and tele-consultation system for the management of chronic diseases within an information and communication technology resource-constrained setting. This is achieved through the development of a multi-tiered framework and model deployed to provide medical tele-management services for rural African communities. The developed system achieved reliability score, availability, uptime and downtime of 0.9, 99.65%, 99.65% and 0.21% respectively. The evaluation results of the post-implementation task revealed that response means of 4.20 and 4.22 were achieved for the system degree of relevance (SDR) and system ease of use (SEU), respectively on a rating scale of 1 to 5.