In a country like India, some our districts have populations that are comparable to an entire country. For example, Burdwan District of West Bengal at 8 million has a population comparable to that of Bolivia in Latin America. However, the healthcare resources at our disposal are extremely limited. To top it all, the few qualified healthcare resources that we have are mostly unwilling to travel to remote and far flung areas of the country.
Incubated at IIT, Kharagpur, Ikure‘s product WHIMS (wireless health incident monitoring system) aims to bring medical facilities to rural India. WHIMS is loaded in a Computer/Laptop is made available to the rural people on the field, after a short training. Medical equipment is then interfaced with the user-friendly software and related patient data is transferred real-time to a hospital/formal clinic-based doctor to advise and monitor the patient.
WHIMS features:
- maintaining patient database scheduling patient appointments sending reminders (and many other types of communication) to patients
- Record symptoms of patients (using graphical symptom recorder)
- Diagnose and prescribe patients
- Upload patient reports/suggest a nutrition/diet plans to patients escalate patients to other hospitals
- Print prescriptions
- Graphical analysis of vital signs of the patient
- Billing and invoice printing
Using WHIMS product, medically trained Health workers (including midwives) in the rural areas can connect to the doctors for the first level of information & diagnosis . The health worker takes relevant information from patient and connects, on a real-time basis, using normal broadband/datacard lines, to an enlisted doctor at hospital; the doctor advises relevant clinical information (ECG, Blood Sugar, Phonocardiogram etc.) and the kiosk operator uses the instruments at his/her disposal and transmits data to the doctor . On the basis of various information made available to the doctor, the doctor can decide to ask more relevant questions, additional reports etc. Once he is satisfied with all the information he can prescribe medicine or general advice.
Essentially, the service offers following benefits:
- Better optimization of doctors which are very scarce in rural areas.
- Training the Healthworkers / Midwifes to use a simple application that can help the doctors for first hand information & act accordingly.
- Use of Technology to help Patients & their cases to be made available to specialists at tertiary hospitals in the cities.
- Help Pharma companies with critical data for inventory management & Molecular research.
- Help Government with critical data to help plan various health programs for better results.
The startup has also launched Hosted-in-the-Cloud HIS (Hospital Information System) that is super affordable (only $10/month) and is aimed at small sized hospitals.
