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Abstract: Provision of adequate healthcare for the citizens is the responsibility of governments. This involves recruiting qualified medical personnel, and providing quality medical services nationwide. The ratio of medical doctors to patients in Nigeria is 1:6,800, which means the citizens are grossly underserved in terms of medical services. Hence, there is need for new strategies that will ensure that more citizens access healthcare services, particularly people in the rural areas. In this paper, a framework for an SMS-based expert system for rural healthcare delivery is proposed, which takes advantage of the wide coverage of telephony services in the rural areas in Nigeria. A preliminary evaluation of the expert system for pulmonary heart disease that was developed reveals that it emulates human expert capability at a reasonable level. This makes it suitable for deployment on a national scale to cater for the shortage of medical practitioners particularly in the rural areas.
Keywords: Medical services, healthcare delivery, expert system, mobile technology, e-governance, Fuzzy logic
1. Introduction
One of the responsibilities of the government to their citizens is the provision of adequate and reliable health care services. The prerequisite for a reliable healthcare provision is recruitment of qualified and experienced medical personnel to deliver quality healthcare for the citizens. This, however, might not be realistic in Nigeria, where currently there is a poor doctor to patient ratio. In 2012, there was doctor to patient ratio of 1:3500 as against the World Health Organisation (WHO) standard of 1:600 (Onyebuchi, 2012). Again in 2014, this ratio went down to 1:6400 (http://www.nigeriaintel.com/2013/05/03/official-one-doctor-to-6400-patients-innigeria/). According to the survey carried out in (Oche and Adamu, 2013) on determinants of patient waiting time in the General Outpatient Department of a Tertiary Health Institution in North Western Nigeria, Sixty-one percent (59/96) of the respondents waited for 90-180 minutes in the clinic. While 36.1% (35/96) of the patients spent less than 5 minutes with the doctor in the consulting room. The commonest reason for the long waiting time in the Nigerian healthcare centres is the large number of patients with few healthcare workers. This shortage of medical practitioners in Nigeria was not because of lack of new medical school graduates but due to economic distress in Nigeria, and this has resulted in the migration of...