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Hansel

Nobel Laureate Develops Low-Cost Health Care System for Bangladesh - 0 views

www.voanews.com/...2009-04-16-voa3.cfm

bangladesh healthcare mobile phone village doctors nurses medical network

shared by Hansel on 17 Apr 09 - Cached
  • meen Health, an affiliate of Grameen Bank, has 51 clinics that offer low-cost treatment to villagers who pay an insurance premium of just $2 a year
  • Yunus says he is working with U.S. medical experts to create health care centers that allow villagers to transmit their medical information over the Internet using cellular telephones to a far-away doctor's computer. "He can see it on the screen and decide what the advice should be in this particular case and pick up the mobile phone and tell the health management center what is the next step to take, what precautions, whatever advice they have," he said.
  • One of his partners, Pfizer - the world's biggest pharmaceutical maker - is helping to evaluate Grameen's health care delivery systems. Another is General Electric, the world's top maker of medical imaging devices such as ultrasound machines. GE is working with villagers to make diagnostic equipment less complex and easier to carry to people's homes. And the Mayo Clinic, a leading nonprofit medical provider, is training village doctors and nurses how to use state of the art medical equipment.
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  • Yunus says another way to make his health care network sustainable is to encourage Bangladeshi women to train as nurses and become part of the Grameen health care system. "In Bangladesh, we are in a very strange situation where there are three doctors per nurse because the shortage of nurses is so big. So we thought we could turn it around. You have plenty of girls with good quality education. We can run them through the nursing colleges, and they become good health care workers and they will fill up the gap," he said.
  • Hansel on 17 Apr 09
     
    Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh is developing a health care network for the poor in his country that will operate at low cost using mobile phone technology.
Hansel

BD Mobile Market to be Overhauled - 0 views

www.thedailystar.net/...news-details.php

bangladesh mobile market Cell phone tariff sector growth competition grameen aktel banglalink teletalk

shared by Hansel on 08 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The top three operators -- Grameenphone, Banglalink and AKTEL -- have withdrawn their Tk 0.25 special tariff. The three operators control more than 90 percent of the market, or 40.14 million customers. The total market size is 45.21 million customers.The mobile operators had previously charged Tk 0.25. Now they are charging a minimum of Tk 0.40 to Tk 0.49 per minute. Grameenphone and Banglalink have recently increased their 'start-up' prices to Tk 900, which ranged from Tk 450 to Tk 500 a month ago. "Bangladesh has the lowest call rates in the world, which means that return on investment takes a very long time. This is why most mobile operators today are still not profitable," Ahmed Abou Doma, chief executive officer and managing director of Banglalink, said yesterday.
  • Egypt-based Orascom Telecom's subsidiary Banglalink entered the market in 2005. Even after having the market's second largest customer base, the company is yet to enjoy profits mainly because they had to bear the huge subsidised connection costs.
  • Till December 2007, Aktel was churning profits. But after paying a big fine for conducting illegal VoIP (voice over internet protocol) operations, like other companies, Aktel started to incur losses from early 2008. However, among the top three players, only Grameenphone is now enjoying profits. But it has also revised its tariff plan to continue the trend.
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  • Once upon a time, mobile operators made profits even after paying the SIM tax on behalf of customers, because the per minute call charge was Tk 7, said Fazlur Rahman, president of the Association of Mobile Telecom Operators in Bangladesh (AMTOB). "That is no longer possible by offering calls at Tk 0.25 per minute."
  • Grameenphone is the market leader, having 20.94 million customers. The BTRC figures also showed Egyptian Orascom-owned Banglalink has a 10.70 million-subscriber base. AKTEL, majority-owned by Telekom Malaysia International, has 8.598 million users.The lone CDMA operator Citycell owns 1.85 million customers while the state-run TeleTalk has 0.93 million customers.
  • Hansel on 08 Apr 09
     
    Some major mobile operators are adopting a conservative tariff strategy to buck the losing trend that has been continuing for years. The companies are retreating from their earlier aggressive marketing positions when they had offered intra-operator calls as low as Tk 0.25 per minute, realising that such competition was not a very good business model.
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