Vision
"To work
towards decreasing the global
burden of disease through
effective Disease Surveillance using mobile technologies"
The Objectives
The main objective
of Handhelds for Health is to
empower the field health-worker, with the appropriate tools like
handhelds mobile devices, to travel to remote areas for data
collection and report information in near real-time,
to enable
the health-care providers to increase health coverage to
under-served remote communities.
The other
objectives are to plug into the Government of India's
Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) and to work
with other groups involved in public health programmes.
According to Dr.
Larry Brilliant, CEO of Google.Org, "early
detection and early response" are key to the
eradication of communicable diseases.
Current
Practices
The Government of India runs a
nation-wide disease surveillance programme that deploys over
130,000 health workers to survey a rural population of over
700 million for communicable diseases. The structure of the
primary health-care system is given below:
|
Health-care Unit |
No. of People |
|
1 Village |
1000 |
|
1 Sub-centre |
5000 |
|
1 Primary Health Centre (PHC) |
25000 |
|
1 Block (Community Health Centre) |
100000 |
|
1 District |
1000000 |
Health-care workers visit
target communities at periodic intervals to conduct surveys,
enter data in pre-formatted registers and manually generate
reports. Inaccuracies in data collection and latencies in
the manual process of transmission of data often result in
long response times and consequent morbidity and mortality.
Problems and Gaps
The current Disease Surveillance system
in India has several problems.
Data collected on paper-based
forms results in:
Duplication of efforts
Inaccuracies in data collection
Delay in detection of disease
outbreaks
Delayed response times for medical
intervention
Non-detection of many cases due to
inaccurate data
Inadequate follow-up for long-term population
studies for chronic diseases like Cardio-vascular disease,
Diabetes mellitus etc.
Lack of scalability for increasing coverage
to larger populations
No feedback mechanism to the health-care
worker
Trans-border
mobility makes it a global problem |
Handhelds for Health