• Technologies powering India's rural healthcare revolution

    Using technology to support healthcare workers in rural India

      • How do you bring preventive healthcare to 800 million people living in remote villages?

        This is the challenge facing India’s government today. And with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like cancer, diabetes and heart disease rising, a solution is urgently needed.

        Fortunately, India has 200,000 auxiliary nurse midwives. They’re the front line of Indian healthcare, providing everything from childbirth support to diabetes management.

        But what these workers lacked were resources to tackle the rise in NCDs. In 2014, Dell Technologies’ Center for Transformational Innovation (CeTI) started working with state governments and other organizations in India to create the Digital LifeCare platform to improve the way healthcare was delivered.

        To accelerate adoption of the platform, the CeTI team created an Android app with interactive modules to lead workers through every step of a patient’s visit and screening, including videos showing proper techniques. The app also teaches patients about living a healthy lifestyle, with topics like nutrition and breast self-exams.

        “We’re working on issues that really matter to a large number of people,” says CeTI Director Sunita Nadhamuni.

        Officially released by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April 2018, the Digital LifeCare platform will serve a target population of nearly 37 million people over the age of 30 with NCDs. Dell’s deployment partner, Tata Trusts, also supports training for thousands of auxiliary nurse midwives. The platform includes web apps for doctors and dashboards for health officials to spot trends across India.

        “Dell’s vision is to develop technologies that drive human progress,” Nadhamuni says. “This initiative will change the landscape of medical services delivery in rural India.”

        All patient data is synced and stored in a government-run cloud. Digital LifeCare’s technology is based on a microservices architecture using the Pivotal Spring framework for ease of development and manageability. A couple of state data centers have this technology running on a Dell infrastructure backbone with Dell PowerEdge Servers, Dell-EMC Storage, Dell-EMC Data Domain for backup, VMware vSAN and Hypervisor.

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