"Indian Healthcare has so many basic problems, why not solve them first?"

Indian Healthcare has innumerable problems. This is something that is obvious to even casual observers of Indian affairs. Often when the subject of introducing Information Technology is brought up, someone pipes up, "But what about so many other problems that have not yet been solved. They are quick to rattle off a list of problems such as:

• There are few doctors in villages

• There are no hospitals in many villages

• Patients are still dying because of so many preventable diseases

• Patients are dying because of lack of oxygen in hospitals

• Drugs and other medical supplies are always in shortage in hospitals

• Drugs are prohibitively expensive sending many families into poverty

• Medical care, especially hospitalization is

• People are reluctant to follow, or are not aware or, preventive measures

• Patients do not follow the treatment regime as advised by their doctors

No doubt, a system like IndiMR will not resolve all these problems by itself. Many of these problems primarily need sustained administrative and social level efforts. Many, for example, are a result of poverty and lack of education.

However, all problems, including ones listed above, have an information component, an effective management of which will help address them in a more efficient, and possibly, a cheaper way. ICT is being proposed as a catalytic agent.

Healthcare being an information intensive domain, effective information management should have been a part of it from the beginning. Since healthcare has managed to function this long without proper tools, does not mean that the tools are unnecessary.

Furthermore, when the argument "so many basic problems remain to be solved in healthcare" is made, it is assumed that a technology solution would be prohibitively expensive and will take away money from the programs to address the other big problems. This assumption is wrong. Although it is difficult to state at this stage what will be the final cost of nationwide implementation of IndiMR, it can safely be said that it would cost a minuscule fraction of many other nationwide healthcare initiatives.

We have seen examples of IT's catalytic powers, sometimes in surprising ways, in industry after industry, sector after sector. For example, local governments have struggled to make cheap urban transport universally available to citizens in cities. And then Uber arrived on the scene, and suddenly Uber created city wide shared market of all people willing to give rides to other people, either as a full time profession, or to earn extra money using their spare time and that of their vehicle. Before Uber entered the scene, no one would have suggested that software-only solution could make such a deep impact on urban transport. Now, a software system, running invisibly in some cloud somewhere, guides the movements of millions of riders and hundreds of thousands of cabs, with almost no human intervention. It has completely transformed urban transport.

IndiMR aims to create opportunities for many such revolutions in healthcare.

We see IndiMR as complementary to the other initiatives to solve most health related challenges. Indeed, we see IndiMR becoming an asset that will have benefits far beyond just healthcare.