The Age of AI: Liberation with Healthcare Commons and Why I am building in the open
A public and open solution to healthcare challenges faced by the common man in a vast demography like ours can only be addressed in the open by the common man.
Hello World from yours truly.
Trust you are off to a great weekend ahead. Did you get a chance to read my summary of the healthcare budget in this years Union Budget?
Just a short article this time and as we speak, roughly 5.8 million Indians die because of diabetes, cancer, stroke, heart and lung diseases each year.
In other words, out of 4 Indians 1 has risks dying from an NCD before the age of 70. About 1.7 million Indian's deaths caused by heart diseases every year, according to the World Health Organisation.
More than ~40% of Indians lack healthcare literacy. I have covered this in detail here:
In that article, I concluded that it makes sense to build healthcare services in the open, talking to the common man. With an array of languages, varied demography. I have been digging data under the hood to truly understand what intuition has always said: Nobody's focussing on the human angle of it all. Equipping the healthcare infrastructure is all too good with the digital transformation happening in our country and with AI in Healthcare hype taking shape with NHA, Apollo, JioHealth, Practo, Remedo to name a few out of the top dozen all wanting to eat the biggest piece of the cake on ABDM UHI, however, things in day to day patient affairs are fairly simple. Something happens, a patient tries to find the nearest hospital or clinic, get consulted, diagnosed and treated.
How can trust be established with a care facility? What is it's reputation? Does it fall under the insurance cover? What do others have to say about it? Where can I get to fast? Did I like the experience? Were all my questions answered? Will it fit my budget?
Whether you realize it or not, right under your nose, over 1400 developers are cranking code to sustain the vision of the 50th Digital Public Good by the United Nations at Open Healthcare Network, to reach one step closer to UN Sustainable Development Goals for healthcare including UN SDG 3.8. it is a commendable effort that has impacted many lives in many Indian states including Kerala, Nagaland, Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim to name a few. In the future articles I will cover some interesting stories, folks from similar projects but for now it would suffice to say that this is the tune of the hour. A robust infrastructure is in the works with many organizations acting as tributaries to the vision of a unified health stack.
There are now plethora of solutions for tele-consultation, appointment, lab tests and gradually EHR segment is making a mark in India and I will cover each of these segments of a patient's lifecycle in my upcoming articles but for this piece lets look at the very first piece of the puzzle: finding the nearest, dearest care facility for first time response and this is a critical part that shapes the entire patient lifecycle and narrative for a healthcare centre for which all these bigwigs are cranking solution after solution.
How can trust be established with a care facility? What is it's reputation? Does it fall under the insurance cover? What do others have to say about it? Where can I get to fast? Did I like the experience? Were all my questions answered? Will it fit my budget? (Remember, that a huge demography stays below poverty line or falls in the poverty trap due to continued or recurring treatments sans or no-sans PM JAY)
This, dear folks, is the premise of why this newsletter exists. Circling back to the very premise of this newsletter, as of today, our flagship project XCoV19 will start publishing updates on our care accessibility initiative project healthcare and how we are planning to build it. We are starting off with what we learnt from our previous iterations of our low-key experiments with MyCovidConnect and MyHealthConnect.
As of today, our flagship project, XCoV19 will start sharing updates on our care accessibility initiative project healthcare and how we are planning to build it.
The plan is to build upon our previous learnings and provide an interface that can talk to our service. The service is supposed to do just one thing: Find care fastest, nearest as per your need. To accomplish this task, you need a service that does these things well:
Understands your distress signals through symptoms, trackers, etc.
Knows where you are and offer results to take action based on your condition and location.
As of today, APIs for a conceptual service such as above for healthcare accessibility are exposed on an ephemeral OpenAPI server instance and more details will be added to the API specification in the coming days. In the upcoming articles, I will be sharing more details about our plans.
If you are thinking a powerful entity or organization is behind this, you are wrong. Organizations, structures and titles would suit ill to this cause, but a dedicated community with a solid plan will allow the execution of this vision.
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