Provision of adequate healthcare for the citizens is the responsibility of governments. This involves recruiting
qualified medical personnel, and providing quality medical services nationwide. Theratio of medical doctorsto patients in
Nigeria is 1:6,800, which means the citizens are grossly underserved in terms
of medical services. Hence, there is need for
new strategies that will ensure that more citizens access healthcare services, particularly people in the rural areas. In this
paper, a framework for an SMS based expert system for rural healthcare delivery is proposed, which takes advantage of
the wide coverage of telephony services in the rural areas in Nigeria. A preliminary evaluation of the expert system for
pulmonary heart disease that was developed reveals that it emulates human expert capability at a reasonable level. This
makes it suitable for deployment on a national scale to cater for the shortage of medical practitioners particularly in the
rural area