Health Ministry partners with Dell, Tata Trusts to provide technology solution for healthcare programme

Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has inked MoUs with Tata Trusts and Dell to provide a technological platform for nationwide prevention, control, screening and management program of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Anupriya Patel, Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, presided over the ceremony and also released the user manual for NCD application under Comprehensive Primary Health Care (CPHC) IT solutions. Preeti Sudan, Secretary (Health), Burzis Taraporewala, Senior Adviser, Tata Trusts and Sarv Saravanan, Senior Vice President, Dell EMC COE, and Jeremy Ford, Director, Dell Giving were also present at the MoU exchange ceremony.

Patel stated that the National Programme for Prevention and Control of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases and Stroke (NPCDCS) stresses on the preventive and promotive aspects of healthcare, which is also impressed upon in the National Health Policy 2017. She further stated that the government has now decided to go ahead with the population based screening under NHM for diabetes, hypertension and three types of common cancers.

“Under Ayushman Bharat, we have decided to transform 1.5 lakh sub centre and public health centres into health and wellness centres to provide a bouquet of 12 different kinds of services of which NCDs form an important part,” she added. She further said that this programme of reaching out to such large target group cannot be successfully implemented without a strong IT backbone. She lauded Dell for the development of the technology platform and Tata Trusts for the implementation support of the NCD programme and added that this software application will help in plugging gaps at the field level.

NCD screening programme addresses hypertension, diabetes, oral, breast and cervical cancers and covers all men and women over the age of 30 years. The programme, which is one of the modules in Ayushman Bharat’s Comprehensive Primary Healthcare (CPHC) Initiative, is currently being deployed in about 200 districts across the country. Through implementation of the software, it will also be possible to track health trends across the country.

Aimed at bringing healthcare technology transformation in CPHC NCD programme under Ayushman Bharat, the Health Ministry is working with Dell as technology partner and the Tata Trusts as deployment partner. A cloud-based mobile, web and analytics solution has been developed to digitise health records to aid the population-based screening programme, to bring quality health services at door step, to enable increased productivity for health workers and doctors, and to facilitate monitoring of delivery of services by state and district administrators.

This technology solution has been developed by Dell, through Dell Giving, Dell’s CSR programme, and in collaboration with reputed institutions and experts from AIIMS, DGHS (Directorate General of Health Services), WHO (World Health Organization) India, ICMR (Indian Council for Medical Research), NHSRC (National Health Systems Resource Center), NICPR (National Institute of Cancer Prevention Research), Tata Trusts, NIC (National Informatics Center), (CHI) Center for Health Informatics, and IndiaStack team at iSPIRT and state health departments. The technology solution is hosted on a government data centre and managed by the central government for Health Informatics, MoHFW.

The Tata Trusts are supporting the quality implementation of the programme in states through training, and programme management activities to ensure technology adoption amongst health staff and steady progress through continuous monitoring. Through the Trusts’ trained and skilled personnel on the field, health workers, doctors and local administrators have ready access to support and guidance on challenges they may face adopting the IT solution.

The NCD IT solution covers programme-level data for screening, referral, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up activities of non-communicable diseases with an aim to connect health workers, doctors and decision-makers in a single, integrated platform. It will provide health records for citizens, mobile applications for health workers, a web portal for the medical officers and dashboards for health officials.