12. Electronic Public Health and e-Governance

This chapter provides a systemic appreciation of a visionary framework for electronic Public Health (ePH) that I had built in the year 2010 in collaboration Deepankar Medhi, Curators’ Distinguished Professor at the University of Missouri Kansas City (USA) (Chowdhury and Medhi in Systems thinking and E-participation: ICT in the governance of society. Idea Group, Hershey, pp. 69–91, 2010). This framework is in context of enabling e-governance addressing a specific aspect of health and well-being, i.e. Public Health. When complexity is high and the range of interrelationships between various elements is varied and diverse, it is important that any Public Health initiative is able to capture different coexisting factors that influence success, consider the interrelationships between different elements in the environment, and understand how, because of the interrelationships, the system as a whole transforms and evolves. In order to appreciate this, we have resorted to taking a systems perspective in evolving an architectural framework for the ePH. The understanding draws heavily from the Indian context as the country presents an interesting array of the challenges that we have mentioned above. Furthermore, rather than being drawn from existing ICT, our proposed approach is visionary and forward-thinking in terms of what we want to see in future ICT in order to enable the ePH. India is also on the verge of significant change in terms of ICT in public services and related e-governance initiatives. The framework that is proposed will not only be relevant to India, but learning from this can also be inferred for other countries with a similar environment. The conceptual ePH remains visionary and relevant in the current times in the absence of any such solutions that we articulated in 2010. In this chapter, I will delve deeper into the nuances of putting in place such a system both from conceptual and implementation perspectives, and lead a discussion on how the ePH can be positioned in the scheme of e-governance. My discussion here will be contextualised for India and my deliberations will keep in mind the nuances and realities specific to this context.