Virtual Clinic Case Study

3.1 Virtual Clinics Benefits and Services

The following are some of the benefits provided by virtual clinics: a) Provision of clinical supports: remote and real time direct patient care will be provided where health care professionals diagnose patients remotely through video conferencing with direct conversations. This helps to overcome the geographical barriers, connecting patients who are not in the same physical location with the health care professionals.

b) Clinical Data Transfer: Sharing of compressed video, audio, medical data such as scanned X-ray, ultrasound and compressed images from one clinic to another.

c) Patient Monitoring: Disease surveillance and patient monitoring are preventive measures. These help in providing useful information

This will however, depend on how well the health care system is able to effectively exploit the capabilities of the ICT. Although the global strive to bridge the access gap is growing and this has been the giant strive of the sustainable development goals (SDG

202020). However, universal access has not been achieved as there are still large percentages of the communities particularly in the developing countries that are currently underserved. Some technology options and universal models that would provide sustainable and cost effective access opportunities in Africa were highlighted [14, 16, 17]. These models were based on the field campaigns undertaken in some rural communities in

Nigeria. Table 1 illustrates a sample of some common basic and medical services and medical devices that are used in telemedicine. Fig 3. End-to- end virtual clinics connectivity

In Fig 3, we provided end-to- end connectivity for the virtual clinics. Considering energy and backhaul costs issues in most

Sub-Saharan Africa, the framework considers Energy Efficient

(Green) TV White Space (TVWS) broadband

This WSD converts the unused TVWS spectrum, which can travel long distances and penetrate thick barriers, into broadband connections that can be provided freely to rural and remote areas where deploying fibre optic cables is quite difficult/expensive. In Fig 3, clusters of villages can be grouped and assigned to a single virtual clinic. These virtual clinics are referred to as primary health centers and have logical connections to the nearby secondary health centers that have physical infrastructures and medical personnel on ground.

Critical and emergency cases could also be referred to the secondary centers. In a situation where the centers can’t handle the cases, the patient can be referred to the tertiary health centers which are mainly located in the state capitals. The Virtual

Clinics generally, intends to connect rural and/or remote areas with health services in the cities, improving access to medical personnel to enable remote diagnosis, prompt treatment and/or referral to the existing health facilities where prompt medical services could be