Design and prototypical implementation of a mobile healthcare application : health express

Abstract

Bangladesh has made significant progress to achieve millennium development goals on many frontiers. However the task is not finished yet and the country can overhaul the service quality of its healthcare sector taking assistance of various mobile based information technology tools. It is a common problem in many parts of Bangladesh that unregistered doctors taking advantage of people’s ignorance provide medical consultation services. While such practice can inflict serious medical damages to the person being treated, hence it must stop. In order to help general public from mistakenly seeking medical consultation from an unregistered doctor we have tried to implement a prototypical mobile health care application that combines the possibilities to search nearest registered doctor, pharmacy, diagnostic centre, clinic and hospital. This application can also facilitate e-prescription transmission among doctors, patients and other relevant stakeholders. This paper describes the requirements for such a system, details its implementation. An in-depth literature review of the topics of mHealth and software engineering challenges to develop mobile application were also conducted to achieve the objectives of this paper.