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Mobile health: India Government Initiatives
Source: http://telecomlead.com/inner-page-details.php?id=10709&block=News
Source Date: Sunday, August 05, 2012
Focus: Knowledge Management in Government
Country: India
Created: Aug 06, 2012

Telecom Lead India: The India government has implemented several initiatives to utilize mobile health opportunities across the country.

Recognizing the potential to reach out to people, especially those living in remote areas and adolescents Indian Government has recently taken steps to integrate and enhance existing health related IT enabled systems, according to Ghulam Nabi Azad, Union Minister of Health & Family Welfare.

A name, address and telephone based Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) is a new initiative of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and is one of the examples of leveraging IT for ensuring delivery healthcare and immunization services to pregnant women and children up to 5 years of age, said Ghulam Nabi Azad, at a recent event in London.

This system is aimed at generating a data bank to validate delivery of services, ensuring ante-natal, intra-natal and post-natal checkups, nursing universal immunization, ensuring quality service delivery, micro planning. These initiatives will have a positive impact on important health indicators like Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) and Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR).

Mother & Child Tracking System employs mobile-based SMS technology to communicate with grass roots level health care services providers, health and family welfare policy makers, health managers and health administrators at different tiers of the health care delivery system.

A pregnant woman registered in MCTS can use the MCTS interface to know which of the scheduled services she has received and which of the maternal care services she still requires.

Parents of a child can get information about vaccines the child has already received and details of the vaccinations due. 25.2 million pregnant women and 18.3 million children have been registered in MCTS since its inception in 2010. In the current year (2012-13) alone, 3.8 million pregnant women and 2.2 million children have been registered.

One example of effective use of mobile technology is using SMS to communicate with the 3.2 million Central Government Health Services (CGHS) beneficiaries spread across India. These beneficiaries are patients who come to the CGHS Wellness Centers for consultation and getting medicines for treatment. Under the aegis of the National Rural Health Mission, mobile telephone based systems are being increasingly used for managing health information systems.

The Government is also planning a mobile based information dissemination program. Through this initiative, health promotion messages could be sent out as and when required for maternal & child health, nutrition for children, adolescent health and population stabilization, tobacco control, information on non-communicable diseases & healthy lifestyle and HIV/AIDS.

India is the second-largest mobile phone user with over 900 million users in the world. It accounted for over 10 percent of the world's online population in 2011.
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