Aimed at bolstering the government’s efforts to manage the COVID-19 pandemic, a city-based startup has developed a new crowd-sourced digital platform — Digital Health Outpost (DHO) — for health workers, the government, and the public.
Fuelled by a data aggregation engine that collects information from multiple channels and driven by artificial intelligence, machine learning and data sciences, the geography-agnostic platform makes data available to the government, public, medical community or the supply-chain participants in real time, as things are unfolding on the ground and helps them take decisions.
For instance, health workers can use it for quarantine management, communicating instructions for those in home quarantine and to comply with safety protocols set up for themselves. Civic bodies can use it in contact tracing, with its latitude/longitude and physical boundary capture and daily updates, tying confirmed cases to quarantine centres and advisories for neighbourhood watches.
Madhu Kongovi, CEO of the startup, said a real-time reporting dashboard is available for decision makers to act on; at various levels - from taluk/constituency to all the way to a State Health Department. This multi-user platform is aimed at creating better health outcomes for any population, he said.
“DHO can also help pharmacies, medical manufacturers and commodity vendors keep the supply chain working smoothly. Digital health records created for patients are easily accessed by health workers with the unique identifiers tied to patients. For patients in home or institutional quarantine, it provides a steady supply of information to cope with self-isolation, hygiene, best practices, and so on taking away the psychological effects of isolation,” he said.
The platform comes with components on Android, iOS, web-portal and a Dashboard, and it has the capability to ingest data from social media too, he said.
He said the company is in talks with the Ministry of Health and Electronics and Information Technology, in Delhi, and in active discussions with countries in Africa and Asia. He said he was also in talks with the officials concerned in Karnataka.
