DUBAI, 11 September 2007 — In collaboration with India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Intel Corporation Chairman Craig Barrett visited the South Asian country to launch a sweeping new effort to transform health care in rural India. The health projects, starting in Tamil Nadu, a state with a population of 62 million, reflect an extension of the Intel World Ahead Program, a global initiative to provide people in developing countries with the benefits of better, faster access to information and communications technology (ICT).
Barrett and Anbumani Ramadoss, India’s minister for health and family welfare, unveiled two projects conceived when they met last November. At the time, Intel had deployed its first remote health programs in a digital village pilot in Baramati, a small town about 120 km from Pune in Maharashtra. The pilot in Baramati attracted the attention of government and industry leaders, inspiring e-health projects that will be deployed across Tamil Nadu and the country. The projects include a tele-health program for community hospitals and a school health-monitoring system.
“Applying technology in pioneering ways can help increase access to health care and improve quality of care for people everywhere,” said Barrett, who also chairs the United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development. “We’ve seen how technology has enhanced people’s lives in Baramati, and look forward to seeing this replicated on a larger scale across Tamil Nadu and the rest of the country.”
“Digital health solutions are the most appropriate tools for achieving our objective of providing health care to the poorest citizens living in the remote areas of our country,” Ramadoss said. “We are confident that these solutions that we’re implementing here can be a model for developing communities worldwide, and will also help us to reduce disease burden on our healthy citizens — poor or rich.”
During his visit to Tindivannam, a town in Tamil Nadu, Barrett participated in the inauguration of a tele-health pilot project at Tindivannam Taluk Hospital, a 100-plus bed facility serving more than 210,000 people. The pilot is being driven by Bangalore’s Narayana Hrudayalaya hospital and Chennai’ Sankara Netralaya hospital, as well as Indian-based companies Microsense, S.N. Informatics and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
The web-based Health Referral System aims to provide improved and cost-effective access to high-quality health care and is hosted on TCS’ WebHealthCentral portal. The project will bring community residents the benefits of health screening and remote diagnostics by specialists, beginning with ophthalmology and cardiology. It will also enable doctors to view patient records and diagnostic images such as retinal scans over a secure computer network. Through videoconferences, specialists across India can also examine patients remotely.
While in Tindivannam, Barrett also visited the St. Philomena Girls’ Higher Secondary School for a firsthand look at a children’s health monitoring system developed by TCS. This first-of-its-kind project in the state addresses both health care and education by installing technology that helps ensure that the government-aided school is a safe and healthy place for children. The web-based solution introduces schoolchildren and faculty to such benefits as digitized health records and health camps with participatory, action-based health learning. TCS hopes to create a model that can be implemented in schools across the country.
L&T to Open Regional Office
L&T Infotech is to open a regional office in Dubai Internet City focusing on IT services and covering the Arabian Gulf and Levant with a target of $100 million in business within three years. L&T Infotech is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the $5 billion turnover Larsen & Toubro Limited, India’s largest technology, engineering and construction company.
L&T Infotech has been focusing regionally on the energy and petroleum services sector, but now plans to develop business in other sectors including financial services, manufacturing and product engineering services. The Mumbai-headquartered company recently received, for the second consecutive time, a supplier of the year award from global oil major Chevron. L&T Infotech was selected by Chevron for the honor from among 43 of its IT suppliers worldwide.
Opening Rural Knowledge Marketplaces
Telecentre.org is a global community of people and organizations committed to increasing the social and economic impact of grassroots telecenters. One such community in India is Mission 2007, which aims to see a Gyan Choupal or Rural Knowledge Marketplace in each of the 600,000 villages in India. A Gyan Choupal is based on the principles of social inclusion and the bottom-up approach to providing knowledge connectivity to address people’s day-to-day needs.
Mission 2007 also plans to train over a million people to operate the rural centers and kiosks. The curriculum is developed to be like a “grassroots MBA” where any knowledge center or kiosk organization can build on and customize to local needs and languages. A Telecenter University and a framework for Rural Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) are also in the plans. It is hoped that the rural telecenters will create much needed jobs and revitalize village economies, thus helping stem the substantial brain drain in villages in rural India.
