Empowering village doctors and enhancing rural healthcare using cloud computing in a rural area of mainland China.

Background: China's healthcare system often struggles to meet the needs of its 900 million people living in rural areas due to major challenges in preventive medicine and management of chronic diseases. Here we address some of these challenges by equipping village doctors (ViDs) with Health Information Technology and developing an electronic health record (EHR) system which collects individual patient information electronically to aid with implementation of chronic disease management programs.

Methods: An EHR system based on a cloud-computing architecture was developed and deployed in Xilingol county of Inner Mongolia using various computing resources (hardware and software) to deliver services over the health network using Internet when available.