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2.5 Applications
Such attempts for various projects from various players aimed for similar sectors of ICT implementation that can be extracted out as common intersections, and they mostly put emphasis on 3 major sectors: Governance, healthcare and education. For most cases, sector’s name is followed by the letter “E” that stands for “electronic” in order to represent the ICT involvement and convergence with such sector. And its applications are widely operated in numerous parts of the world, attempting to initiate the digitalization of conventional system, in hopes to bring higher efficiency and greater outcome
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2.5.1 E-Government
The first practice is the E-Government, application of ICT in Governance. This means that regulatory and personal information will be electronically managed, as well as keeping records of each activity between the sector and the involved personnel. For Easier
understandings, fig 3.1 and 3.2 below may be taken as a reference. Let us assume an imaginary situation where there are 4 sectors: Hospital Patient management, Paying Taxes, Voting and Immigration offices. As shown on fig 3.1, they will each require their own management system attached to it, whereas implementation of E-Government may offer a common platform that can connect every sector at once for complete and total management and maintenance. By having electronic management of each sector, transparency is naturally promoted by taking away the discretion, thereby curbing opportunities for arbitrary actions and corruption. By enhancing exposure of detailed data on transactions, each action will be
14 “Cisco Networking Academy”, Cisco, accessed Nov 11 2016,
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/training-events/resources/networking-academy.html
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trackable and link the corrupt with their wrongful acts, as well as boosting efficiency and encouraging citizen relations by making rules simple.
However there is also drawback or counter argument, that more corrupted regimes will deny implementation of such system, for responsible personnel might fear the exposure of their corrupted acts. Also security against cyber-attacks remain crucial, where fall of one E-Government system may result on exposure of personal information of every sector that are related, such as medical or financial transaction records.
<Figure 2.5>: Before the Introduction of E-Government
Source: Compiled by Author
<Figure 2.6>: After the Introduction of E-Government
Source: Compiled by Author
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E-Health has 4 important components that must be well established and fully co-functional in order to be effectively operational. First of all, the electronic health records of patients, where the information may link to the E-Government system and may be applied not only to track medical records but may also be utilized for national health insurance system and taxation for tax returns. Then required is the computerized physician order entry. Patient and physician will be remotely connected via computer or other electronic devices that allows doctors to offer diagnosis to patients without arranging a physical visit of patients to remote hospitals. Next is e-prescribing system for preventing drub abuses and guaranteeing
transparency. Lastly, there must be enough clinical supports, which means that there must be enough public health institutes or centers where minor diagnosis or simple treatments may be performed in place of hospitals. To help understanding, following scenario may be taken into consideration.
A patient is remotely monitored by a doctor, for patient’s home is geographically isolated from central city. This appointment is not merely a video chat, for it may include exchange simple diagnostic data such as body temperature, pulse, or blood sample analysis, depending on the tools patient has established at home from aids of nearby health center. Doctor then sends E-prescription to the patient and depending on the seriousness of patient’s condition; patient can either visit nearby clinic and receive treatment or may have to visit doctor in the actual hospital for further analysis and even surgery. Luckily for this case, patient merely needs drugs and shots from nearby health center, and problem is solved.
Despite the tempting sound, E-Health system faces some difficulties as well. For the most obvious part, the reliance of remote diagnosis, as well as the linkage between the hospital and local public health institutes cannot be trusted just yet. It also faces great risk of
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personal information, where electronic management of prescriptions and other personal medical records are simply too great to be taken or treated so lightly.
2.5.3 E-Learning
E-Leaning is also referred to as E-Studying or E-Education. This concept, unlike the previous two, is little more familiar to us, since some aspects of it has already been
implemented in our lives. The advantages or offering online courses and lectures is that geographically remote students can participate in classes, and even if they are not able to attend the class in live session, they can still save the lecture material and review in their convenient time slot. Online courses may encourage heavier involvement such as class discussion and asking questions, or bringing in the aspect of fun by adding active features to the courses (such as drag and drop games or fun animations/sounds for children), which will eventually enhance learning opportunities. Also with digital libraries, students not only enjoy equal access to information, but the concept of intellectual properties and copy rights are also maintained. This will be beneficial to the government as well, in terms of saving space, time and cost from physical construction of an actual library.
The classic challenge E-Learning face is its efficiency. As one can imagine, there is only certain degree where digital education and books have to offer in places of actual lecture from real instructors with real books. The progress monitoring is also difficult for instructors in a sense that it will be extremely difficult to track all the students electronically without seeing their actual faces and class participations.
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