VIEWPOINT
Harnessing mobile technology to provide basic health care in rural India Pallab Maulik India Alliance Intermediate Fellow The George Institute for Global Health, India Source: cio.com
Healthcare in India is an expensive affair given that 75% of it is provided by the private sector. It is not surprising to find many people, especially those who are poor and also many within the relatively affluent middle-class section of the society, become financially impoverished even further following major health related expenses. While some of such high medical expenses may be unavoidable given the nature of the illness and the treatment provided, often a lot could have been avoided if adequate steps were taken in early stages of the illness to prevent it from reaching such an advanced stage. This is especially true for some chronic ailments related to cardiac diseases, diabetes, mental illnesses, renal diseases. Often the amount of care needed at early stages of diseases like high blood pressure, diabetes, depression, etc, are relatively easy, and can be provided by non-specialists at primary care level. These conditions also account for some of the highest rates of death and disabilities in the country, hence treating them early makes a lot of sense. The case for mobile based health care
In order to provide care for such conditions at early stages, one needs to operate the primary care system effectively. Providing good quality primary care by empowering non-specialist physicians and non-physician health workers like Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) or similarly trained health workers through basic training and adequate technical support is more important in countries like India with huge populations, as it is close to impossible to expect that there would ever be adequate number of trained specialists, or that there would be such across every geographical area of a country as diverse as India. Besides training primary healthcare workers, there is an urgent need for exploring and developing alternate methods of providing healthcare using easily available and affordable techniques that can increase the reach of care into the more disadvantaged sections of the community.
One such way is to harness mobile technology and make use of more than 900 million currently connected mobile phone users in the country. This is an ever increasing number with more and more people switching to smart phones every day. Interestingly, 300 million of those who have mobile phones, are in rural areas (a number similar to the population of the US), where providing basic health care for preventable diseases is of utmost need, given the even poorer health services
Typical village setting from the area where George Institute, Hyderabad, is testing its mobile based clinical decision support tools
facilities in our rural sector.
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