Swasth, a Tele-health Network, Launched to Provide Free Corona Care

Digital Healthcare Push 

* 100+ private and not-for-profit entities join hand to frame tech response to national crisis

* India’s first big push towards mass adoption of digital healthcare as a citizen empowering platform

* Swath platform facilitates seamless and remote interaction between registered medical practitioners and patients

* App-based consultation service in Hindi, English and Gujarati to begin with, and will be expanded to 25 Indian languages

A coalition of over 100 healthcare specialists have come together to launch Swasth, a nationwide telemedicine platform for Corona care, which digitally connects Indians to the best doctors and wellness providers. Swasth is a swift response promoted by the country’s health and technology leaders to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to leverage telemedicine as a national priority in the current stressed times. The mobile app-based service leverages India’s technology prowess to deliver equal and affordable healthcare to 1.3 billion people, cutting across geographical and income divides.

This indigenous digital healthcare system is being launched at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged traditional service providers.

Mr. Kris Gopalakrishnan, a part of the Swasth Governing Council, said, “Swasth has brought together the best of resources in the country to provide free healthcare to bring quick relief during the crisis. Swasth will work to further public health goals and work in coordination with the Medical Council, public health organizations, and the private sector to expand quality healthcare access to the masses. I firmly believe that this crisis is a great opportunity to re-invent healthcare delivery in India.”

Swasth facilitates seamless, remote interaction between registered medical practitioners and patients through multiple modes of video and telephony. Swasth deploys AI based triaging to determine the care required, culminating in a digitally signed prescription and treatment advice.

Along with the free consultations, Swasth will also provide services like home quarantine assistance, diagnostics, pharmacies, hospital bed discovery and booking assistance at a subsidized cost.

All doctors on the Swasth platform are duly verified and undergo specially designed training programs on tele-consultation and COVID-19 clinical protocols.  Swasth is in full compliance with the industry-accepted cybersecurity norms for healthcare platforms. It uses a defense-in-depth approach to ensure that data is securely transmitted, stored, managed and accessed. Currently, the app supports consultation in Hindi, English and Gujarati and will be expanded to 25 Indian languages.

Swasth is the country’s first big push towards mass adoption of digital healthcare as a citizen empowering platform.

Dr Nachiket Mor, a member of the Governing Council, added, “Swasth is a unique non-profit coalition of members from multiple sections of the Indian healthcare ecosystem, including individual doctors, small and large hospitals, diagnostic labs, pharmacies, telemedicine platforms, insurance companies, and healthcare-technology companies, who have joined hands with the goal of creating affordable healthcare for all Indians in every nook and corner of the country, so that they can immediately get the care that they need for this crisis, as well as for all their other healthcare needs. Swasth will do this by making it easy for patients to smoothly access the services they need from its members, and will also enable each of its members to provide a wide range of high quality services to their patients, by giving them access to protocols, technologies, and platforms that are best in class, completely interoperable, and fully compliant with the latest guidelines.”

Dr NK Jairam, a key member of the project team, said, “As we move on with the current Corona pandemic and with social distancing being one of the key remedies to eradicate it, telemedicine is going to be an integral part of the healthcare system. Tele- consultation has been offered by doctors since the early 2000s, however, it has gained rapid momentum because of the current situation. With Swasth, telemedicine will gain a boost which will empower patients to make quick decisions and also teach them self-care.”

Abheek Singhi, Senior Partner at BCG, and member of the project team for this initiative, said,  "Swasth is a consortium of 70+ organizations and 200+ volunteers with a common goal of building a comprehensive COVID care platform in the short term and of leveraging technology to transform primary healthcare delivery in the medium term. This is the first time such a coalition like this has come together. BCG is privileged to be partnering with this alliance"

Swasth is created by a not-for-profit consortium of different players across healthcare providers, telehealth platforms, entrepreneurs, technology experts and doctors. Swasth received a grant of INR 10 crore ($1.3 million) from the ACT Grants, an umbrella platform of entrepreneurs and investors backing start-ups fighting the pandemic.

About Swasth

Swasth is a Not-for-Profit initiative that aims to leverage India’s proven clinical capabilities and technology capabilities to democratize access to quality primary care – for any citizen anywhere in India. Swasth will ensure access is affordable by leveraging digital technology to optimally use available provider capacity, and promote a system that fully adopts national health standards. A coalition of like-minded, relevant and successful physicians, professionals, technocrats and entrepreneurs from the healthcare ecosystem have voluntarily come together to pool in their time, intellect, IP and financial resources to help India leapfrog and provide quality healthcare using best in class digital technologies.

Can messaging technology attracts rural mobile users?

India has emerged as the most favorable market for telecom players with the rate of mobile users growing at over 10 million per month. By end of 2008, there were 340 million active mobile users in the country. After focusing the needs of the enterprises, urban users and the youth, the spotlight is now on the rural users with most players looking at avenues to expand in the rural markets. Even though mobile phones have reached the rural areas, simple applications such as messaging is still a foreign mode of communication; the most common reason being unfamiliarity to English.

Realizing the needs of rural people, Noida based Luna Ergonomics, a texting technology company has come up with a software, which will help people send text messages in 11 major Indian languages by using only 'ek angootha' (one thumb). One just needs to upload the company's Panini software in his/her mobile phone and start using the texting facilities. But this technology can only be used only in mobiles that have java applications pre-installed.

The company has made available four versions of the software - Panini Basic, Panini Clever, Panini Premium, and Panini Touch. Specifications have been done according to the usage of every version. Panini Premium would offer a superior version of CleverTexting and different modes of Ergonomic typing on the phone than Panini Basic and Panini Clever. Major Abhijeet Bhattacharjee, Founder, Luna Ergonomics says, "Panini software also offers SMS compression, first of its kind in the world, increasing the payload of an SMS in an Indian language by over 300 percent. Once a message is compressed, it is sent in encrypted form."

"Other than mobile phones, this software can also be used in other devices like remote and set-top-box," he explains.

"To make this facility available to large number of people, we are in talks with phone handset companies to pre-embed the application on the phone. We are also trying to negotiate with well known retails," says, Bhattacharjee. This technology could be very useful for mobile marketing services, he adds. In the beta version of the launch, the company has witnessed over 50,000 downloads from all across India and world.

With an aim of providing better technology to connect all through regional languages in the country, Bhattacharjee, a retired army officer founded Luna Ergonomics in 2008. Prior to founding the company, he had worked in organization like Gurus Media, Monster.com in different posts. Under the umbrella of Luna Ergonomics, five employees currently work on the development of this technology.

The company plans to unveil its latest product in the siliconindia Start-up City event to be held on June 06 in Bangalore.

SiliconIndia

Are new technologies rescuing Web start-ups?

Web entrepreneurs are increasingly embracing new technologies from "cloud" computing to new computer languages to try and slash costs as investors disappear because of recession.

Investors and entrepreneurs say cloud computing, new and free programming languages, open-source software, and use of the Internet to distribute and publicize products have made starting a company relatively inexpensive and will allow startups to ride out the credit crunch and recession.

"What you're talking about is life or death," said Drew Clark, director of strategy for IBM's venture capital group, speaking to media on the sidelines of a business conference.

Venture capital investment dived 71 percent in January and is not expected to rebound for much of 2009.

"For the best of these companies, this could be the difference. If this had happened three years ago, they'd be gone," Clark said, adding that IBM advocates open source.

One much talked-about innovation is cloud computing using the Web to access programs and data at remote computer centers. That makes costly, long-term capital expenditure and storage unnecessary.

Persistent concerns about the security of data stored on remote servers and the dependability of external systems are offset by its economic advantages, entrepreneurs say.

"In 2005 we needed 10 to 20 times the money we need today. There was a certain amount that entrepreneurial intelligence couldn't get around. Somehow you had to pay that piper," said James Siminoff, chief executive of Grid.com and Simulscribe, which changes phone messages into text.

One hour and $50

A decade ago, Michael Eisenberg, a general partner with Benchmark Capital in Israel, recalls he had to pay $10,000 each for Sun Microsystems servers.

"Today if I want to start up, it takes me one hour and $50 and I can turn on my capacity from Amazon Web Services from anywhere in the world," Eisenberg said.

Some fledgling companies like Delve Networks are capitalizing on that trend, charging clients over $250 a month to host video on their websites. Delve itself owns little more than the personal computers used by its 20 employees.

Time is critical for start-ups because they burn cash every day. Hence the rise of streamlined programming languages such as this year's hit, Ruby.

Ruby is a free, open-source language that Siminoff's chief technology officer, Mark Dillon, said is so concise he can do in three lines of machine code what it took him 25 lines in Java, an older language. That speeds up program revisions.

Corporations have turned to offering free, open source software -- a boon for cash-strapped start-ups. Sun Microsystems, IBM and others give away software to attract developers and gain contracts.

Finally, Internet marketing allows start-ups to publicize their wares at a fraction the cost of more traditional marketing or advertising campaigns.

"There are all these social conventions about companies that assume they are very big expensive things," said Silicon Valley start-up guru Paul Graham, whose "Y Combinator" invests $10,000 to $20,000 into quick, ultra-cheap startups. "It's just not true anymore."

Agencies

Do Internet users want more languages?

Which is the one language that the people of India aspire to learn? Which is the one language that most Indians use while communicating on the Internet?

The answer is English. But you obviously knew that.

At the Internet Governance Forum being held in Hyderabad, Ajit Balakrishnan, CEO of Rediff.com, said that there is no evidence from the last ten years of the Internet business that users want Indian languages. Rediff has email in 11 languages, and 99% of the users prefer to use email in English, says a report.

Balakrishnan believes that a majority of Indians use the Internet for non- or little language skill associated activities like sending send messages, download music, view pictures or videos. These activities hardly require text input/usage.

Interesting comment from the Rediff CEO so is he trying to say that the investment he made to make those 11 languages available for its users was futile?

Not really; in fact, it could be called future-ready. In the coming years when Internet penetrates into large sections of rural India, that's when the regional languages will come handy, perhaps?

Source: Techtree