BHB, with the funding support from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, is providing technical assistance to Directorate General of Medical Education (DGME) to develop its management information system (MIS). An information technology (IT) consulting firm, Activation Ltd., has been working on it since December 2021 and has almost completed development of all modules, including foreign student application and student information, plus the DGME website. The firm is fine-tuning the system and adding demand-driven tools requested by DGME in addition to routine maintenance and support.
DGME and other institutions and policy makers can use the MIS dashboard to immediately access different types of national medical education data. The data comes from 134 medical academic institutions in Bangladesh (56 public and 78 private) and profiles of more than 20,000 medical and dental students. The student summary shows that 16.6% are from other countries, viz., India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Pakistan; 41.5% of students are studying in public medical or dental colleges, but only 1.6% of those are foreign compared with more than one quarter (28.1%) of the 11,987 students at private colleges who are foreign. More than 90% of the total student population are studying the MBBS course and the rest are in the dental graduation course. Since 2022, the DGME MIS has handled the entire admission process for foreign students seeking admission to public and private schools—from online application submission and assessment to candidate selection and admission completion. The number of applications received from foreign applicants in 2022 and 2023 were 3,890 and 3,532, respectively.
The Director General of Medical Education expressed his satisfaction with the MIS to the BHB team and Activation Ltd. on 18 September 2023 and urged extended assistance for further MIS development.
