Technology Alone Is Not the Answer in Healthcare
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
“A technology only solution isn’t going to get us anywhere,” says Shelly Saxena.
He’s referring to the growing number of social enterprises and development initiatives that use mobile phones and telemedicine to deliver healthcare in India.
“Whether you’re poor, middle class, or wealthy, you want to see a doctor, and you would prefer to see that doctor in person,” he says.
That’s why Saxena developed Sevamob, a hybrid solution to solve India’s healthcare woes– a mobile clinic that arrives on wheels, stays camped out for the duration of the checkups, provides the patient with test results and even basic treatments, and then leaves.
Saxena who worked at IBM and is well-versed in technology became passionate about healthcare when his mother who lives in Lucknow, India was misdiagnosed and her treatment, subsequently, was delayed. The fact that she couldn’t get timely, and accurate care, frustrated him.
Saxena, who has been living in the US since 1998, had been traveling back and forth between India and Atlanta. He was quite familiar with the challenges in getting decent healthcare outside of India’s major cities: lack of doctor and tech-savvy clinics who valued data, and inadequate medical equipment. But how to solve this? Telemedicine alone, SMS campaigns and mobile health wasn’t going to cut it.
Source: Pulitzer Center (link opens in a new window)
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- Health Care, Technology
