India's disease screening programme grabs S-A nations' attention

MUMBAI: India's Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD) screening programme, facilitated by Tata Trusts and Dell, has now grabbed the attention of several South Asian countries, officials said here on Tuesday. While Bangladesh, Bhutan and Myanmar are interested in replicating the NCD screening, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has presented it to the 11 member-countries of its South-East Asian Region for population-based screening and its large-scale utility by field-level health workers.

Launched in 2017, the programme has so far enrolled around 7 crore people (80 million) across 29 states and UTs and has screened around 30 million (3 crore) for diseases like diabetes, hypertension and certain types of cancers. Of these, around 60 lakh have been referred for further medical consultations out of whom around 15 lakh have been treated till date, said the official. The programme, one of the modules in Ayushman Bharat's Comprehensive Primary Healthcare (CPHC) Initiative, is currently deployed in 503 districts across the country and will be able to track health trends across the country.

It has also developed a cloud-based mobile, web and analytics solution — an application — bringing quality health services at people's doorsteps, enabling increased productivity for health workers and doctors, and facilitating monitoring of delivery of services by state and district administrators.

The technology solution is hosted on a government data centre and managed by Union Health Ministry's Centre for Health Informatics, with the technology solutions developed by Dell.

Tata Trusts supports implementation of the programme in the states through training, and programme management activities to ensure technology adoption amongst health staff and steady progress through continuous monitoring.

Besides the WHO, several major institutions, like NHSRC (National Health Systems Resource Centre), AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences), ICMR (Indian Council for Medical Research), NICPR (National Institute of Cancer Prevention Research), NIC (National Informatics Centre) and the IndiaStack team at iSPIRT (India Software Product Industry Round Table) have collaborated with the programme. (IANS)

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