HYDERABAD: Understaffed, overworked and undertrained workers, unavailability of medication and lack of referral facilities have been identified as the main deficiencies in India’s rural healthcare system at an IIITH roundtable on ‘Technology to address the last mile in healthcare.’
“We are going to use emerging technologies to create solutions to problems at ground level. We will hand it over to NGOs so that anyone with basic knowledge will be able assist those in rural India get access to better healthcare facilities,” said Ramesh Loganathan, who heads the Raj Reddy Center for Technology and Society (RCTS), IIITH, which has been organising roundtable conferences with NGOs, doctors and academicians on healthcare problems.
The centre is now working on five to six projects. He said that the centre has already developed an app, which is ready to be used in a cancer screening bus.
“An NGO, Grace Cancer Foundation, has five cancer screening buses, but the problem is with manpower as it is hard to find doctors willing to go to remote areas. Now, we have created an app through which doctors will be available remotely and can refer patients to nearby hospitals,” he added. The centre has also developed an app for a medical drive for another NGO CARE India. “We are working on two apps for CARE India — one to detect congenital heart diseases and other to create AI models for anaemia screening via an app which will allow a basic smartphone to do entire screening. For Grace Cancer Foundation, we are developing an oral cancer algorithm,” he said.
