e-Health & Learning Project

The general objectives of the project were to:

• Improve the professional development of operators in the health sector;
• Stimulate international collaboration and coordination among the European and Asian health operators;
• Encourage the use of ICT, including elearning tools as new professional instruments in the health sector;
• Use information technology (IT) in uplifting the current health situation and bringing Asia (Bangladesh in particular) to an equal footing with the developed world;
• Bring new technologies nearer to local traditions;
• Provide health education to the health community and run an awareness programme;
• Train the volunteers, general practitioners, and paramedical staff through properly built workshops with particular reference to telemedicine;
• Foster collaboration between medical centres;
• Promote access to European medical expertise to hospitals, general practitioners, and 3rd party users;
• Contribute to the continuity of care across borders and in less populated areas;
• Promote European Union (EU) expertise outside Europe and to attract new customers to using telemedicine services;
• Enhance and analyse the ethics and juridical issues, raised by the use of telemedicine, and in particular the problems of medical data confidentiality, as perceived on a day-to-day practice, and as compared with community laws.

The ‘E-health & Learning’ project was developed in three phases:

1. Collecting information about Bangladeshi clinicians: A needs analysis phase focusing on Bangladeshi clinicians’ views, attitudes, and practice concerning evidence-based medicine (EBM) and ICT.
2. Delivering continuing education medical seminars via videoconference. This was implemented with ‘video streamed seminars’ downloadable from the project Web portal instead of the planned videoconference seminars, which were found to be technically impossibly to deliver.
3. Finally, the planning and implementation of asynchronous interactive seminars, built with an interactive content structure in mind. The material used in the second phase was elaborated to fit a more interactive and structured web-based learning approach, where participants are encouraged to learn at their own pace.

The series of seminars focused on a range of topics including diagnosis, therapy, and prevention of diseases or other medical conditions. These seminars attempted to raise awareness about EBM. Eight seminars were delivered to doctors in Dhaka and Mymesingh, in Bangladesh. The original activity plan was to deliver the seminars via videoconference, but as a result of technical problems the lectures were video taped and streamed to Bangladesh via the internet. Video streaming was not real time, while in some cases, where downloading the video files from the web was not possible, video tapes with the seminars were shipped to Bangladesh via postal mail. The participants watched the seminars in a classroom specially set up for the need of the video seminar. The video streamed seminars featured the lecturer and the Powerpoint presentation accompanying the seminar. The streamed video either switched between the lecturer video sequence and the slides video sequence or the lecturer video sequence was reduced to a small square and projected over a corner of the slides. The participants were also distributed handouts of the Powerpoint presentation to make the reading of the slides easier.


The e-Health & Learning project website was developed to provide information about the project as well as house documents, and a set of e-learning resources. The website also houses the content of the seminars themselves, including video and slides to download, handouts, and evaluation questionnaires.

As a follow-up of the telemedicine initiative in Bangladesh, Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) Bangladesh began offering telemedicine sessions in early August 2005. The project arranged three seminars to exchange medical information. These sessions included real patients at the remote site, and one physician and one medical expert present at the head office to provide suggestions.

Health, Technology.

According to the project's website, "healthcare worldwide has to respond to new and growing needs originating in demographic and socio-cultural changes, progress based on medical research and technology and globalisation. Within these constraints e-Health has a great potential becoming a key factor for a widespread healthcare provision. Technologies like networked electronic health records, broadband communication and secure networks enable the delivery of "ubiquitously available" and enhanced healthcare services to patients. The massive deployment of information technologies changes the access to and the nature of healthcare at rapid pace." The e-Health & Learning Project aimed to promote the idea of a widespread deployment of eHealth into daily medical practice with the use of an e-learning tool to train health operators and keep them informed about new disease and techniques.