Healthcare

Unavailability of public and private healthcare facilities and qualified medical practitioners are not only identified problems in rural India but perhaps symptoms of many other problems hidden behind it. Publicly available documents and research papers based on the working from numerous NGOs and scholars reveal, rural Indians suffer from acute healthcare apathy compared to their urban counterparts. This is particularly true in the cases of long-term treatments and preventive healthcare. This apathy is, of course, a factor of rural poverty, but cultural negligence, social discrimination; prejudice-dominated healthcare culture, reluctance to examine or accept scientific advice all play a significant role in overcoming the current inertia. While poverty often is the reason for poor healthcare, health-based poverty traps keep families poor for generations.

While building a healthcare framework for rural India, we need to delve into two opposite realities of contemporary India. On one hand, the unavailability of qualified doctors in rural areas will not change very soon but on the other hand, the spread and advancement of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have created a very realistic possibility of linking rural citizens with remote urban community of medical doctors. However, telemedicine is much more than a video conference between a doctor and a patient. Thus, we need to develop a framework for an integrated Cyber-Physical Healthcare System. Cyber-Physical Healthcare System must focus around (1) Capacity Building (2) Medical Service delivery to rural citizens (3) Healthcare Advocacy program to actively build health awareness within lifestyle (4) Governance of both cyber aspect and physical aspect of the system.

Cyber-Physical Healthcare system is an integrated combination of a physical healthcare infrastructure at the village managed by trained paramedical staff recruited from the local community and a cloud-based Tele-medicine platform that will leverage the qualified doctors’ pool from remote city areas and allow them to provide healthcare service seamlessly to the rural community. The system has the following layers.

• The Medical Practitioners who will  normally be available over video conference to the patients
• Local service delivery layer is located in the village and consists of medical administrative staff and nurses.
• Point of care tools for bridging the gap of lack of test facilities in village area
• Medicine Bank of generic medicines

Our Tele-medicine platform has been developed by the students of National Institute of Technology, Durgapur under the guidance of their teacher and industry experts. The platform allows capturing of medical vitals like Blood Pressure, skin temperature, body weight, blood sugar level etc. and presenting them to the remote doctors online. Doctors then interact the with the patients over video calls and write a prescription. Local health workers then print the prescription and disburse medicine from the medicine bank.

Our healthcare initiative started on July 10 2022 with a medical camp attended by two doctors- Dr Prabir Chatterjee and Dr Mrinmoy Bera. Periodic medical caps are designed to bring familiarity and build a relationship between the doctors and the rural patients who are often not familiar with the approaches of modern healthcare practices. 

Poor villagers are often accustomed to neglect early symptoms of any medical situation. Rural lifestyle also leads to many diseases which otherwise can be prevented with a little precaution and awareness. Under our healthcare program we offer preventive treatments to the patients of hypertension and diabetes. We are working on early childhood nutrition and development, dietary balance and diversity, and lifestyle changes to prevent diseases like malaria, diarrhea, malnutrition etc.