Mobile Healthcare B-Plan - Update

Well, a brief update on our B-Plan, though its been over five months now since we presented that idea at a panel in IIT Delhi. Our idea went ahead to get merged with a product in making from Public Health Foundation of India. In December 11- January 12, we had a good amount of interaction with PHFI's Kanav Kahol, who is spearheading a tablet PC based healthcare solution, named Swasthya Slate. We had ultimately revised our B-Plan according to their product and it turned out to be a good presentation in the end. 


It was nice to see PHFI launching the device in March this year in Odisha, India. The link of the demonstration is here. The device would surely prove to be useful, especially in areas where not much diagnostic facilities are available.


Those who are interested in looking at our presentation can view it here.

Medic Mobile - A great firm to follow

When I met people from Medic Mobile last week, I had little knowledge of how exactly an m-Health device works on the ground. After interacting with them, I came to know about the good work they are doing and the amount of change they plan to bring to the healthcare situation around the world. Medic Mobile is a CA based firm which is involved in designing products and services around mobile technology to adress healthcare situations in developinng as well as developed world. They have simple tools which could capture the patient data, tramsmit it to a remote storage and make it accessible to physicians and decision makers. This is the fundamental service which almost all m-Health providers provide. What is unique with Medic mobile team is that they have developed tools (such as a SIM app) which is a mobile phone SIM like chip sitting besides the actual SIM of the phone, but helping the user in capturing the patient data more efficiently. Also, the team majorly works with open source software platforms to keep the cost of the implementation lowest possible. 


It was heartening to know that the team has brought changes in a small village in a small African country - Malawi, by empowering the local health workers with a simple SMS based mobile tool. The benefit of SMS is that it is real time and objective. The disadvantage is that SMS can only be 160 characters long. Though, the system is working quite well, especially in emergency conditions. The question that remains to be answered is that even if we allow a larger population to reach to the physicians at right time, do we have enough physicians in first place to handle such volumes. The answer perhaps lies in making a network of doctors and healthcare professional in a wide area, which is quite missing in current solutions. The solutions proposed by most of the innovative healthcare efforts die down in pilot phase itself. A self-sustainability and applicability to wider area needs both the government, public and private participation. Healthcare is such a field where money is never a problem. A dying person will pay anything to keep himself up. Real challenge is the execution of such innovative programs at wider scale and its social acceptability viz-a-viz conventional healthcare options. Future lies in innovative health systems and we are here to see how it goes ahead, especially in countries like India.