ICTs in Rural Mongolia

“Telemedicine…especially in a country as large as Mongolia…is the [optimal] approach for development of health services.  The Internet helps to close distances and helps people communicate and realize their dreams.”

-Ts. Lkhagvasuren, MD, PhD

 Mongolia is a struggling developing country characterized by various obstacles and inequities that seem to impede the country’s development.  Geographically, Mongolia is a vast, isolated, landlocked territory with extreme weather conditions and a depleted natural environment.  It’s population of 2.7 million is extremely small for its size and its suffers from an extremely dichotomous urban-rural divide.  The market economy in Mongolia is improving the standards of living in urban areas, but the remaining 43% of the Mongolian population live in dispersed, hard to reach rural areas with scarce resources.

With a mere GDP of about $8.8 billion, Mongolia struggles not only to fund but to disperse adequate, essential health care to its population, especially to those scattered throughout rural areas.  The International Development Research Centre’s ICTs for Health Services in Rural Mongolia plan, which started in 2003, and was funded by the Pan Asia Networking program initiative looked to change the face of Mongolia’s lacking health system and outreach.  The project relied on Mongolia’s reputation as a regional leader in Internet technology, and adoption of ICTs for its foundation.  Mongolia’s willingness to experiment and implement new technologies was essential for the development of ICTs to be implemented in the country’s health sector.

Rural Mongolia was targeted as the perfect launching pad for health ICTs, as one of the central problems to the country’s rural-urban inequity and divide was the poor quality, and difficulty in accessing health care in rural areas.  The stress that this inadequate system was placing on the Mongolian government led to investment in ICTs with the hope that health care would become more accessible and efficient.

The explicit goals of the project were twofold:

1.     Develop distance medical diagnosis in rural areas

2.     Develop distance learning programs for rural medical doctors using Internet-based applications (taking into account low bandwidth)

A distance diagnosis center was established at the Mongolia National Medical University in Ulaanbaatar, where doctors could diagnose patients by looking at cat-scans, and other medical records or documents sent to them using Internet applications.  Training programs for Mongolian health professionals were also developed to teach them new technologies and methodologies. 

The project surveyed common diseases in the rural areas and developed software in collaboration with Mongolian doctors, aimed at teaching other health professionals in the country who lived extremely far away from main medical centers. The software developers were extremely cognizant of the low-bandwidth Internet conditions in Mongolia and designed the program with this limit in mind. 

The software utilizes the local language and open source technology to create sets of diagnostic information that teaches health care workers to diagnose common diseases in rural Mongolia with accuracy.  700 individuals were trained to make these diagnoses in the first two years after the software was implemented.

While the program initially experienced some difficulties due to doctor’s unfamiliarity with how to operate the programs or how to use computer-Internet technology, this was basically overcome by the third year of implementation when an astounding 976 individuals attended distance learning seminars over the Internet, and a further 113 rural doctors from more than 21 provinces enrolled in distance learning programs.

This cost-effective technology has proven extremely efficient and beneficial to the Mongolian health care system and is bringing some publicity to the region. This May, the General Electric Company opened an office in Ulan Bator, Mongolia’s capital and signed a distribution agreement to supply new healthcare products, information, and technologies to the Mongolian market.

ICTs can and have proven to be invaluable to developing countries such as Mongolia.  The countries often have inadequate numbers of medical professionals, a challenge that can be mitigated by distance diagnoses aided by ICTs.  Doctors and nurses can also update medical information on their mobile phones, receive updates about patients via the Internet or mobile phones, and can respond more effectively and in a timely manner to their patient’s needs.  The implementation of ICTs in rural Mongolia serves as proof of the concrete benefits that ICTs can have on resource-lacking health systems in developing countries.