Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka

Thanks to a project initiated by the  Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA)  and implemented by the University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC), cost cutting and a reduction of inconvenience  will soon be a reality in specialist care for patients.

The project “Vidu Suwa” is designed to bring comfort to the rural patient, specialist doctor and the peripheral clinic. It was inaugurated by Health Minister, Nimal Siripala de Silva at a function at the Galadari Hotel Colombo recently. With this inauguration, an ICT oriented project will be put in place for the first time in Sri Lanka, connecting a base hospital and a district hospital to make specialist consultancy service available to patients in rural areas, thus reducing cost and worry to the minimum. In this first ‘vidu suwa’ endeavour, the Marawila base hospital will be the specialist e-consultation centre while  the Dankotuwa  district hospital will act as the e-care clinic.

The main focus of the ‘Vidu Suwa’ project is to link the specialist in a general hospital in a city with a patient in a peripheral setting via a doctor using easily acquirable and relatively inexpensive technology  currently in use. This simple concept is put into practice with little extension to existing technology.

Senior Lecturer, UCSC, Dr. Shiromi Arunatileka, said that this concept that would be inaugurated on Monday June 22, connecting the Marawila base hospital to the Dankotuwa district hospital as a pilot project. The project could be replicated to operate between any base hospital and a district hospital, bringing  ICT-oriented ease, as well as cost and time reduction to patients seeking consultancy service.

The main beneficiary of ‘Vidu Suwa’ is the patient as his travel expenditure, difficulty of travelling and travel time will be reduced tremendously. Unnecessary secondary visits to tertiary centres and specialist clinics will be reduced. The cost of transfer of patients from peripheral hospitals to tertiary centres also can be drastically reduced. This will facilitate the availability of ambulances for critical and emergency transfers between institutions. The availability of patient health records electronically will help these hospitals to make pro-active decisions on resource allocations and patient care.

The specialist makes himself available  at many e-clinics within the shortest possible timeframe. This has the added impact of specialised care reaching out to the periphery. Needless to say, that knowledge transfer occurs with benefit to the doctor at the peripheral e-clinic and a closer professional link is established between the specialist and the peripheral doctor.

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