Virtual Healthcare Vans Are Taking High-Quality Medical Technology to Rural Areas

India has a dismal doctor-to-patient ratio – around 1:1,900, against the UN-prescribed 1:1,000. The disparity is especially high in rural areas, with about 70 per cent of the country’s population living there.

The situation is especially worrisome as bad infrastructure and lack of facilities hold back doctors from taking on assignments in these areas.

What’s more, patients and their relatives from rural areas usually don’t want to visit doctors in the cities. The reasons range from the lack of education towards appropriate treatments to their worries of spending money on transportation and medical expenses in the city. Also, they worry about losing wages for the days they travel to the cities for their treatment.

Making healthcare virtual

However, one company seeks to change the scenario by introducing virtual healthcare through its customisable vans. The Crescendo Corporation rolled out their first indigenously built virtual healthcare vans in 2012. Fitted with state-of-the-art technology equipment, including PCs integrated with hardware, medical devices and software to be fitted on board; web-based solutions; independent database system, integrated PC-based digital ECG; ECHO; and digital stethoscope and pulmonary kits, with real-time screening of 12 leads ECG, HR, SPO2 and NIBP, even on low bandwidth, the vans appear to be the answer to the medical and technological disconnect between the Indian urban and rural.

Manufactured by Crescendo Corporation, an enterprise of Cdr. Binu Tom Jacob (Indian Navy, Retd.), the vans include advanced technology and various medical products like digital pulmonary kit, stethoscope, etc., which use technology to digitally transmit the obtained medical data to a doctor anywhere in the world.

But the idea for the virtual van was conceived by Girish Kumar, who was the country head for HP Life Sciences, which is what the company was called back in 2012. “I knew I was in a position to help bridge the gap between the necessity and impediment in rural healthcare. But I also realised that it had to be done by using a medical van that could take medical aid to the patient, instead of the other way around. The medical van, however, had to be created from scratch and tailor-made to specifications,” says Girish, who now heads DXC Technology.

Taking medical technology to people, one rural area at a time

The first two of the vans were built for two very definitive purposes – palliative care in Kerala under the aegis of philanthropic–CSR project of Hewlett Packard Ltd., as the company was known in 2012, and tele-psychiatry, for M.S. Chellamuthu Trust & Research Foundation in Madurai, Tamil Nadu.

Source: The Better India