nasscomfoundation

www.hmri.in


Extending 24x7 non-emergency healthcare consultancy to people, specifically the rural population in Andhra Pradesh

INSIGHT
India has a sizeable rural population, most of which is severely underserviced by traditional healthcare resources. The existing rural health coverage is less than one-third of the World Health Organization guidelines, resulting in approximately three billion annual incidents of patients receiving unqualified or no treatment.

In Andhra Pradesh alone, more than 86% of the villages lie beyond three kilometres from the nearest hospital and roughly 600,000 patients go untreated each day. Besides the obstacle of distance from a centralized healthcare system, these rural populations also have several unique health concerns, including risk from mosquito-borne diseases, poor access to potable water, and a variety of sanitation/hygiene issues.

INNOVATION
One of the most unique means of reaching at-risk rural populations is HMRI’s 24x7 health helpline - 104 Advice. This health contact centre offers non-emergency medical advice, information and counselling services on the toll free ‘104’ number. Assisted by pre-formatted algorithms and disease summaries, callers are matched with appropriately qualified health workers (including medical specialty experts) who provide advice/counselling or make preliminary diagnoses and referrals for further treatment.

IMPACT
104 Advice is currently the world’s largest health contact centre, attending to an average 1,500,000 calls every month. Since it’s inception in May 2007, 104 Advice has received 3, 50,50,997 calls, of which 96% are calls made for medical advice. 2, 75,856 calls came for counselling services, and 2,03,982 calls were made for information enquiry. HMRI’s efforts to address the last mile problem in healthcare delivery are being widely recognised.

Currently this service is available in Andhra Pradesh and HMRI aims to provide a scalable model for improving access to healthcare throughout the developing world.