Monitoring and Assisting Maternity-Infant Care in Rural Areas (MAMICare)

2. Related Work

In the past 10 years Information technology (IT) has been used to improve the accuracy of patient records, and health monitoring. Benefits and challenging unsolved problems continue to be the outcomes of such attempts (Bates, 2003), such as electronic health records, remote monitoring, tele-health, health data collection and processing, and clinical decision support systems, to name a few. Groups interested in the IT-Healthcare efforts have gathered and exchanged opinions to identify technological areas with the highest benefits. These groups integrated by members of the public, health care provider and private sectors selected tele-health and electronic health records, in this order, as the most valuable IT approaches. The groups of interest also identified as a disadvantage the changes in the current practices and processes in the delivery of health services (Jennet et al., 2005).