ICT as a tool for accessing medical content and knowledge in local languages - Sri Lanka’s perspective

ICT tools are crucial to providing urgently needed information and knowledge to healthcare professionals and the general public regardless of their geographical location. Most health care professionals in Sri Lanka use ICT for acquiring knowledge, but the use of ICT by the general public for accessing health care information is still at a very low level, although the Government has spent millions of rupees in developing ICT infrastructure all over the island. To address the needs of developing content and application relevant to the Sri Lankan domain, the e-society programme, ICT Agency of Sri Lanka rolled out a two-pronged grant mechanism through which partnerships were established several CBOs, NGOs as well as state and private sector organisations.

This paper by Shriyananda Rathnayake discusses and reviews how the ICT agency of Sri Lanka will help in developing local language content related to medical information and how it will facilitate access to general public.

The paper specifically looks at the following projects:

• Happy Life - provides an effective means of providing reliable and timely information through counselling services accessible through multiple channels - Interactive Voice Response, SMS, Web Chat, Skype, Google chat, Yahoo chat and the Web. It provides direct access to information and personal counselling facilities (from anywhere) without the identity of the inquirer being exposed
• Wedananasala - Wedanasala is bi-lingual medical information portal which contains more than 2000 authenticated medical related articles in Sinhala and Tamil Language. The Site is enriched with text, pictorial illustrations and video based content. The portal facilitates accessing the information in an easy way, classifying and giving easy navigation options
  
• First Aider - a tri-lingual content portal which provides high quality information on First Aid. It provides two options for easy navigation. e-Text book version and web version both of which are enriched with e-photos, illustrations and video content. The illustrations and the text content have been made in compliance with international standards with the help of St John’s Ambulance