IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2015 - 53

accuracy and mining model prediction, the developed model is further
analyzed and assessed, and used
for decision making.

Scalability and Standardization
Scalability is an important factor
that determines the success of
the proposed community healthcare solution. Specifically, there is
a fixed cost of the solution associated with the basic infrastructure
supporting the electronic medical
record system within the central
medical facility. Beyond that, the
cost of the system is largely scalable horizontally in the dimension Figure 11. The use of general purpose handheld devices is essential for ensuring
of the number of patients and com- widespread adoptation of the system. The built-in RFID tracking framework enables any
handheld device with a built-in or plug-in RFID reader.
munity healthcare workers for one
central medical facility, and can be
replicated from one facility to another within one
state or country. The efficiency of the community
healthcare system will be dependent on the geographical distribution of the inhabitants around the neighborhood of the community healthcare workers.
Any mass-market solution would standardize to gain
economies of scale. There could be issues with compatibility across electronic health records and RFID formats between medical facilities. Ideally all equipment
and records should follow some standardized format.
As the population in emerging markets tends to be relatively static due to closely knit family units, this could
be a less urgent issue to resolve right away, despite its
importance. The advantage of common formats for
electronic healthcare records and RFID across different multiple medical facilities is that it allows adequate
tracking of patients moving from one location to another, with the aim of providing the right healthcare treatment even when people move to another healthcare
provider. Another advantage of standardization would
be to enable multiple sourcing of equipment and supplies, reducing costs.

Service Enhancement Opportunities
There are many enhancements that may be applied to
a community service as a social business [12]. These
enhancements may be built on top of the basic system
to improve service quality and scope.
For example, the solution could be expanded by
introducing remote medical diagnostics. The mobile
RFID read/write device can be equipped with a set
of easy-to-use procedural menus for guiding community healthcare workers to perform common or
routine medical diagnoses and to decide on treatment.
MARCH 2015

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Figure 12. The Qiwi system is very similar to Cellica, but
accesses data via NAV which uses the SQL database. Hence,
business logic is provided for, and the mobile user can update
and create new records.

This can help ensure some degree of consistency in
consultation and practice across the pool of community healthcare workers.

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