When: 18 April 2014, 10:00 am.
Where: intERLab, AIT
Abstract
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has made a significant impact on the functioning of enterprises and the urban communities. However, benefits of ICT revolution are yet to reach the rural communities. An impressive infrastructure developed for rural primary healthcare becomes inefficient if there is no real time communication between various healthcare delivery agencies. As a consequence, rural population continues to face many difficulties to meet their primary healthcare needs. It is postulated that research and innovation using ICT will help overcome these challenges and provide timely quality primary healthcare to the needy.
After extensive study of the existing primary healthcare system in India, an integrated ICT platform was developed based on distributed computing, internet technologies and modern wireless enabled healthcare devices to deliver primary healthcare services. This platform called ‘mHEALTH–Primary Health Care’(mHEALTH-PHC), developed at TCS Innovation Labs-Mumbai, is essentially a tool to enable efficient interaction between the doctor at Primary Health Centre (PHC) and health workers at remote Sub-center, using mobile phone. mHEALTH-PHC was selected by World Health Organization to display in their e-Health pavilion at World Telecom Conference, Geneva. Field experience shows that healthcare personnel involved at various levels in PHC are comfortable in using the tool and are enthusiastic to employ such a tool for efficient service to the community.
In the presentation, an attempt will be made to address the challenges faced by the rural population to meet their healthcare needs. The mHEALTH-PHC solution focused on Reproductive and Child Health (RCH) program under National Rural Health Mission in India will be discussed, along with the experiences gained in deployment and the research issues involved.
About the speaker:
Details about Dr. Nandini Bondale are available at this link: http://www.tifr.res.in/~nandini/