Report
RICE (Remote Interaction, Consultation and Epidemiology) is a Dartmouth Medical School project to link Vietnam’s central hospitals with rural clinics using cellular smartphones, reflecting the reality that most rural Vietnamese clinicians already carry a mobile phone rather than a landline. In a 2007 pilot, Dartmouth’s William Garrity and other volunteers spent 13 days testing a smartphone link between the National Hospital of Pediatrics in Hanoi and outlying clinics and regional hospitals, enabling physician consultations, sharing of the hospital’s digital medical library, patient transfer information and disease tracking, with the aim of letting patients get better care locally rather than overwhelming central hospitals, and of helping clinics report outbreaks quickly enough to contain a potential pandemic.