Providing quality healthcare to its citizens is one of the biggest challenges of any developing nation, and India’s diverse culture and unique geographical spread present an added level of complexity to this task. iKure is using the IBM Cloud to help doctors remotely access healthcare data and prioritize treatment of patients in rural areas with high-risk of heart disease.
India is the second most populated country in the world with an estimated population of 1.37 billion people. Most live in rural areas without immediate access to basic healthcare. With just one doctor for every 6,000 patients, the challenge was to take basic healthcare to the remotest areas of the country.
iKure deployed IBM Cloud Pak® and IBM Watson® AI to facilitate the development and deployment of a predictive model for cardiac care.
There are around 840 million people living in rural India who have limited or no access to basic healthcare in their neighborhood. Nearly 86% of all the medical visits in rural India require patients to travel over 100 km to meet a doctor. Even the infrastructure required to provide basic healthcare facilities falls short of norms defined by the World Health Organisation.
iKure has set up a chain of primary healthcare clinics, with the objective of providing affordable and accessible healthcare using technology. Front-line healthcare workers from these clinics travel deep into rural India to meet patients and carry out basic diagnostic tests. The data collected via tests, wearable patches and reports along with patients’ demographics and pre-existing conditions are collected and transmitted to the iKure platform created on IBM Cloud.
Using IBM Cloud Pak, iKure is helping doctors to access this data remotely and prioritize treatment of patients in rural areas. Previously, doctors would manually sieve through thousands of patient profiles to determine the most at-risk cases. Now, the system uses machine learning to rank patients according to their severity, selecting the most pressing cases for analysis which enables cardiologists to score patients accurately for faster diagnoses.
Using IBM Cloud Pak, iKure has been able to touch the lives of 9 million people in 7 Indian states. Their next goal is to set up 200 hubs across India and reach 25–30 million Indians. The platform has also been implemented in 9 African countries and Vietnam in Asia.
iKure (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an award-winning, tech-savvy, rapidly-growing, revenue-positive social enterprise that meets the primary health care and prevention needs through a unique combination of health outreach initiative, skills development, and technology intervention. The venture is poised to rapidly scale beyond its curative model, looking to the future of disease prevention and wellness for 840 million people in rural India.
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