Medicine Byte By Byte

Bobby John Varkey December 15, 2003 00:00 IST Medicine Byte By Byte -0001-11-30T00:00:00+05:53

Perfect health, they say, is today just a click away. For the city-slickers, perhaps, but for rural India, computers are still a far-fetched cure for ill health. Besides, erratic or no net connectivity doesn’t help. In this scenario, naysayers argue online healthcare may in fact take a more circuitous and tedious route to reach villages.

They may be proved wrong, if Rishi Pal Chauhan and Steven Rudolph’s dream project takes wings. The founder-directors of Jiva Institute, a social enterprise based in Faridabad, Haryana, Chauhan and Rudolph have designed a unique teledoc project using leading-edge technologies to deliver traditional healthcare to India’s rural poor. "It’s simple," says Chauhan, an engineer with a high-profile job in New York before he quit to come back to India and teamed up with friend Rudolph, an educationist based in Japan. Explains Chauhan: "Our field representatives take diagnostic information from patients using specially designed mobile phones to transmit information on the net to a central database. Doctors at the Jiva Ayurvedic health centre in...