Towards a sustainable e-health deployment - An integrated medical information system for Sri Lankan case

Strategic deployment of information communiction technology in health systems is promising to ensure reducing medical cost, enhanced medical treatment-quality and to serve the underserved population. International medical cooperation has served both developed and developing nations to overcome technological and social barriers in e-health deployment in many ways. However, most of the past e-health efforts reportedly either discontinued or exhausted their improvement potential due to isolation from other e-health activities in the health sector. For a rapid absorption of technology and sustainable development in the e-health sector in developing countries, it is an extreme necessity that years of financial investments and efforts exercised on scattered form of e-health developments are inline with the country's long term e-health development plans. In this paper, we propose a methodology that deploys a fully functional dedicated system, Integrated Medical Information System (IMIS), with the collaborative effort of system designers, medical practitioners and the government. IMIS is an extension of a previously designed system by the authors for international medical collaboration.