Development of appropriate telemedicine to improve the management information system for community health care in Indonesia

In addition to its large size, the primary health care in Indonesia is uniquely characterized by the dispersed/isolated population over many islands of the world's largest archipelago. The geographic size creates diverse health statistics, which is accentuated by some developing countries' leading causes of death, i.e. infant/child and mother mortalities and malnutrition. The resulting inefficiency of the primary health services needs to be significantly reduced by making timely policy and operational decisions on the basis of appropriate information with rapid implementation and adequate impact monitoring, while optimizing the utilization of scarce resources. Telemedicine, even at its elementary level, offers the opportunity of alleviating this inefficiency. This paper discusses the development of a proposed appropriate starting telemedicine module of a computer-based national health management information system (MIS) which is initially targeted for the quantity of coverage rather than the comprehensiveness of services. It is expected that such system will be flexibly expandable in line with the development of personnel and funds. To optimize the usage of the computer, it is proposed to include some physiological measurement modules in the proposed telemedicine system.