New Delhi: New technologies are developed and deployed across all industries during this pandemic. The citizens have also wonderfully adopted technology for education and other purposes, said Dr Neeta Verma, Director General, National Informatics Centre, MEiTY, Government of India while addressing Inaugral session of APAC Glocal India Healthcare Conclave organised by APAC News Network on 27-28 August 2020 and attended by 55+ Healthcare Leaders across the country with 1000+ delegates presense.
Detailed text of her address –
The concept of Telemedicine was not much explored earlier, but now it is the right time to do so. NIC has a product called eHospital which is a cloud-based software on hospital
management system.
This is presently used by more than 400 hospitals in India. We have added a teleconsultation model to it wherein patients can take medical consultation while sitting at their homes. Arogya Setu is currently been used by 15 crore people in India. It is a digital data driven technology for manual contact tracing as a part of disease surveillance programme. It uses Bluetooth and GPS technologies. The app builds a social graph of the people you have come in contact with and the data is recorded and saved in the user’s mobile phone. No personal information or data are saved.
In case an Arogya Setu user tests positive for COVID-19, the app will analyse the data of the people he has come in contact in the last 30 days data using technologies like Epidemiology, Data Science and AI. Then the score is calculated for anyone who has come in contact with the infected person for the probability of him contracting the infection and the order of risk. Based on this, alerts are sent. People can also upload their own data and know the scenario in the geographical vicinity. Users can also give consent of sharing the QR code generated by Arogya Setu where the status can be checked. Service Plus is another application which has a wide user base. This generates passes for the people who need to move to other places. RT-PCR is another app wherein the data of people undergoing tests can be collected and sent to ICMR for further study and policymaking purposes. The app is also being used by the administrators and policymakers to work at ground level. We have realized the challenges and utilizing IT to address those.
