With early detection vital for cancer care, Narayana Hrudayalaya's Majumdar-Shaw Cancer Centre and SANA, a research group at Harvard/MIT, have come together to launch a mobile healthcare project in India. To start with, the hospital has taken up a pilot project to detect oral cancer in rural areas of north Karnataka.
Chairman of Narayana Hrudayalaya Devi Prasad Shetty and Chairperson of Biocon Kiran Majumdar told presspersons here on Saturday that cellphones uploaded with a specialised software would be used to screen high-risk individuals in the rural areas.
Paul C. Salins, Medical Director of Mazumdar-Shaw Cancer Centre and Narayana Hrudayalaya's Multi-Speciality Hospital, said that the pilot project involved KLE Dental Hospital in Bangalore and Navodaya Medical College in Raichur.
“These institutions will train general physicians, nurses and medical students to screen high-risk individuals using automated questionnaires encoded on the phone and also take pictures of the lesions using the phone's camera. The condition can be diagnosed by either using the phone's decision support algorithms or by uploading the data to the hospital's Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system for specialist feedback,” Dr. Salins said.
This procedure could be followed by recommended treatment and counselling through interactive videos on the phone. If required, the patient could be referred to a specialist, he said.
“We also plan to use the services of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) working under the National Rural Health Mission to take this project forward. We have trained 20 ASHAs,” he said.
The software has been developed by Sidhant Jena and Russell Ryan from SANA.
