Working with the government of India to bring healthcare to rural populations
Delivering unprecedented medical care
Patients walk into their local CSC (community access points for electronic government services, ranging from financial to educational and health services), where a VLE (Village Level Entrepreneur) helps them to use the RingMD virtual health app to undertake a virtual consultation. Many patients from remote areas will never have seen or spoken to a doctor before! Much of the medical advice imparted corrects misdiagnoses given by untrained, informal medical providers in rural areas, which often do more harm than good for patients. Prescriptions can be made over the RingMD platform from afar, and medicines are then delivered to where they are needed. Follow-up consultations can also be scheduled at CSCs to check whether treatments are working. Where severe conditions are discovered or physical examinations are required, patients can be referred to a hospital or clinic.
Why India?
• Scarcity of qualified doctors — there is just one doctor per 1,200 citizens.
• Lack of access in rural areas — a staggering 70% of the rural population have no, or minimal access to healthcare.
• Lag in healthcare system innovation — the World Health Organization (WHO) ranks India’s healthcare system 112th out of 190 countries.
Ensuring quality and universality
Our app is available throughout India. Though bare essentials such as clean drinking water and sanitation are not a universal given in India, a huge percentage of the population has access to a smartphone — numbers are estimated to reach 340.2 million in 2017; the United Nations University reports that in India more people have access to mobile phones than toilets. With a doctor always on hand at the touch of a button, virtual healthcare is starting to reach the most remote corners of rural India.
Offering life-saving, free advice
Aligning our services with Facebook’s Free Basics, we also offer an entirely free online Q&A forum, where people can type a health query or search for symptoms, with expert health professionals undertaking pro bono work in order to provide medical assistance. This opens up this life-changing and free information source to people in remote, rural communities who have never previously had access to the wealth of information and guidance found online. Read more about it in this blog post!
