Our idea
Our idea is to improve healthcare in rural areas by connecting city doctors with rural area medical staff. Please read below for a more detailed problem and solution description.
The Problem
Many regions in Thailand are located in remote areas with limited medical infrastructure. Therefore, people in rural areas don't have access to good medical care. They receive wrong diagnoses and treatments. This prohibits a fast and full recovery and can even lead to death. This creates a large gap in the quality of life between the people living in rural areas and those living in larger cities in Thailand. Since approximately 68% of the Thai population lives in remote areas, more than half of the population is affected by this problem. We see this issue as an opportunity and would like to address it with our project.
The idea
We want to provide medical staff and volunteers in rural areas with smartphones as a medium to communicate with city doctors. By connecting less skilled medical staff with highly skilled city doctors, the diagnosis and treatment in rural areas can be improved significantly. Video conferences as well as medical treatment database will help to close the knowledge gap between staff in larger cities and rural areas.
A video conference feature will be used to ask for suggestion and help from highly skilled doctors in urban areas when diagnosing or treating a patient.
We also plan to develop a smartphone application providing a medical treatment database that volunteers and medical staff can access for additional information. The information provided in the application will be updated with the help of private hospitals and medical schools.
We want to cooperate with smartphone producers who will provide the smartphones for our project. The smartphones do not need to be latest model but can also be be second hand phones or outdated models. They simply need to have a video conference function and internet access.