Experience of using mHealth to link village doctors with physicians: lessons from Chakaria, Bangladesh

BACKGROUND: Bangladesh is facing serious shortage of trained health professionals. In the pluralistic healthcare system of Bangladesh, formal health care providers constitute only 5 % of the total workforce; the rest are informal health care providers. Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) are increasingly seen as a powerful tool for linking the community with formal healthcare providers. Our study assesses an intervention that linked village doctors (a cadre of informal health care providers practising modern medicine) to formal doctors through call centres from the perspective of the village doctors who participated in the intervention. METHODS: The study was conducted in Chakaria, a remote rural area in south-eastern Bangladesh during April-May 2013. Twelve village doctors were selected purposively from a pool of 55…