Three doctors team up to take healthcare to nation’s remotest corners

HYDERABAD:  Three doctors from Hyderabad, Thiruvananthapuram, and Pittsburgh in USA teamed up to assess how effective mHealth — usage of mobile and wireless technologies for delivering healthcare services — can be in helping people located in remote areas of country with little access to healthcare. 

For their study, 1,835 individuals in two villages of Medchal district were screened for hypertension (blood pressure) and diabetes, the two biggest causes of heart diseases. While 413 people were found to have hypertension, 189 suffered from diabetes. After 24 months of mHealth intervention, blood pressure and sugar levels were brought under control in 54 per cent and 34 per cent people suffering the two issues respectively.

The study titled ‘Technology enabled non-physician health workers extending telemedicine to rural homes to control hypertension and diabetes (TETRA): A pre-post demonstration project in Telangana, India’ was recently published in the journal PLOS One. It has the potential to be the next big project in the country to provide quality health care in rural areas. 

SHARE develops app that identifies diabetes, HTN

Society for Health Allied Research and Education (SHARE), India which conducted the study developed an in-house mobile app incorporating automation and artificial intelligence to identify and manage hypertension and diabetes. This app was installed on tablet computers. Three Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) workers were trained to use the healthcare app apart from household data collection, using sphygmomanometer, glucometer and arranging Skype interviews between the patient and doctor. 

Dr Shailendra Dandge of MediCiti Institute of Medical Sciences and a researcher with SHARE, India who led the team of three doctors said, “The ASHA workers would measure blood pressure and blood sugar levels using electronic equipment given to them, which would then be connected to the tabs. The tabs would collect the data directly from the equipment and upload it to the cloud. If there was any abnormality in the data, an alert message would be sent to the concerned doctor immediately. The doctors were available every day from 7:30 am to 12:30 am and will respond over Skype.”