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V. Rishi Kumar

HYDERABAD, Dec. 23

IN an era where handheld gizmos are changing the way we live and communicate, particularly for the upwardly mobile, here is piece from the rural heartland.

Mobile devices are bringing dramatic changes in the lives of people at grassroots level in the country, albeit in a small and yet certain way. The research and development centre of CMC Ltd, which is now part of the TCS following its acquisition earlier this year, is working on three interesting information technology projects — the India Health Care Project, the Integrated Tribal Management Project and an education project that seek to empower people at grassroots using handheld devices.

Part of a team headed by Mr C.L. Roy Sastry, Mr K.V. Sunil of CMC, R&D centre, told Business Line that the grassroot workers in the health care management project — termed multi-purpose health assistant, is imparted training to handle i-Paqs and gather inputs that help to monitor health care data and provide care.

This grassroot level health assistant is in direct contact with 5,000 people in a particular village assigned to him. Operating out of a public health centre (PHC) that serves as an office, dispensary and stores, these healthcare assistants collect basic demographic data and attend to Mother and Child Health Care programmes, immunisation and family planning.

This health assistant also attends to works relating to various diseases, monitors drinking water sources and provides healthcare education and counselling.

While providing convergence of services, this helps in extending individual follow-up for pregnant women, and children — covering care from pregnancy to delivery time and beyond such as ante-natal care, high-risk pregnant women, birth of child, immunisation and post-natal care.

Further, this also helps the Government in monitoring various family welfare services such as spacing methods for children and in extending counselling services.

The project, being funded by the World Bank under its Infodev initiative, is being taken up under the aegis of the Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Andhra Pradesh. This system, while providing valuable inputs for effective healthcare administration, removes redundancies in data entry.

With an intuitive navigation system, these devices help generate automated reports. While reducing paperwork and saving time, the system would bring in efficiencies, Mr Sunil said.

This project seeks to reach out benefits of technology for improving healthcare system by providing support tools in cutting down on paperwork, increases accuracy and facilitate in swift follow up action.

This MIS (management information system) provides the health administration information on epidemiological and immunological aspects as well.

Under this initiative in the Nalgonda district of Andhra Pradesh, out of 67 PHCs, 32 are using these devices and the rest are supported by desk-tops. While serving as an ideal system for healthcare administration, this system can also be used to provide common Social Security Identity, he explained.

Similar initiatives using technology and handheld devices are under way for Tribal Management at Utnoor in Adilabad District as a part of ITDA (Integrated Tribal Development Agency) and a major education project for school dropouts at Munugodu mandal in Nalgonda district. Similar initiatives are under way in two districts of Uttar Pradesh. Though the concept looks simple, this can be broadened to any application covering data gathering and monitoring-related applications.

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