BHUBANESWAR: In a novel attempt to ensure early screening and detection of chronic diseases in India, Bangalore based Narayana Hrudayalaya and SANA (a research group at Harvard/MIT) have joined hand to launch a mobile healthcare project that promises to become cost effective and easily accessible for the treatment of patients.
India is experiencing a double burden of disease with persistent infectious disease coupled with increasing incidence of chronic disease like cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Unfortunately, due to lack of specialists care in rural areas, most chronic diseases are diagnosed at an advanced stage, when treatment becomes complicated and expensive.
“There are 6 billion human beings living on earth today, but only 11 million hospital beds and 305 million computers. However, there are 3 billion cell-phones in use and growing as we speak. Therefore, it makes intuitive sense to harness the power of mobile technology to provide healthcare to the masses,” SANA team lead and Harvard Business School student Sidhant Jena told “The ET”.
SANA is an award winning, multidisciplinary organization at MIT/Harvard that has developed an open-source telemedicine platform that allows structured medical assessments to be encoded onto smart-phones, interfaces with diagnostics such as ECG, Ultrasound and X-ray/CT-scanners, and finally enables two-way sharing of medical data between a central medical record database and the phone.
Doctors said, most patients show up with stage-4 tumors that cost lakhs to treat and survival rate is about 30%. Incidentally, if detected early, the survival rates go upto 90% and cost comes down to Rs 15-30,000 to treat.
“We believe using mobile technology and the collaboration of our partner institutions, we can enable early disease detection and thus create a win-win situation for patients, hospitals and even insurance and wireless companies!” Mr Jena added.
Russell Ryan, lead engineer and MIT student explains, “The technology is open-source and ideally suited for developing countries like India not just for cost-reasons but because its “equivalent and perhaps better than existing proprietary solutions. With the proliferation of mobile networks, smart phones, and open source software we can overcome three fundamental issues in telemedicine – power, cost and connectivity!”
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