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In India, particularly in rural and semi-urban India, access to primary healthcare remains a big issue. People in rural areas travel long distances to reach hospitals. The closest hospital to a village would be around 40 to 50 km away, government hospitals and health centers tend to be understaffed or poorly maintained with lacking equipment. That usually results in delayed treatment and avoidable deaths. Private hospitals are focused in the city areas and are too costly, hence inaccessible.
Present solutions by the government are evidently not effective since government facilities have no doctors and machinery, and NGO efforts are small in number and based on donations. At present, there is no low-cost model that guarantees basic quality healthcare which is accessible and reaches the poor and marginalized communities.
Arogya Express is an extremely promising solution to all of the above issues. It achieves this through mobile health vans that are fitted with diagnostic equipment (BP machine, glucose meter, ECG) and telemedicine facilities linking patients to urban physicians. Basic drugs are administered on the site, and patient information is safely maintained in electronic health records.
Who benefits from this?
The major beneficiaries are state governments, NGOs, and rural families, while communities overall gain from early detection of disease, decreased hospital burden, and enhanced overall health. This allows for basic healthcare to be reached even in rural areas without having to incur high costs.
This issue concerns me because I personally believe that healthcare is not a luxury but a fundamental necessity. I have come across a few newspaper reports where people lost their lives because of the unavailability of basic healthcare centers. People who had extremely minor illness lost their lives because of negligence and unavailability of hospitals. If India is able to get ATMs to each village, we should also be able to get ATMs for healthcare (mobile clinics) to people at large.
Technical Details
This project would need moderate seed funding to fund vehicle acquisition, medical equipment, telemedicine infrastructure, and training. With the right partnerships, Arogya Express can scale across the country, making sure that no Indian goes without basic healthcare.
