India’s NCD screening programme attracts South East Asian countries

Mumbai: India’s Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD) screening programme, facilitated by Tata Trusts and Dell, has attracted the attention of several South Asian countries.

Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Myanmar have already evinced interest in replicating the programme. This followed the World Health Organisation (WHO) presenting the programme to the 11 member-countries of its South-east Asian Region (SEORA) for population-based screening and its large-scale usability by field-level health workers.

Introduced in 2017, the NCD screening programme, launched by the Government of India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), has, thus far, enrolled 80 million people across 29 states and Union Territories, and already screened about 30 million for common NCDs, like diabetes, hypertension and certain types of cancer. About six million have been referred for medical consultations, of whom at least 1.5 million have thus far been treated. The programme, which is one of the modules in Ayushman Bharat’s Comprehensive Primary Healthcare (CPHC) Initiative, is currently being deployed in 503 districts across the country and will be able to track health trends across the country.

The programme has developed a cloud-based mobile, web and analytics solution – an application — bringing quality health services at people’s doorsteps, enabling increased productivity for health workers and doctors, and facilitating monitoring of delivery of services by state and district administrators. The technology solution is hosted on a government data centre and managed by Health Ministry’s Centre for Health Informatics.

The technology solution has been developed by Dell. Tata Trusts supports implementation of the programme in the States through training, and programme management activities to ensure technology adoption amongst health staff and steady progress through continuous monitoring.  Besides the WHO itself, reputed institutions, like NHSRC (National Health Systems Resource Centre), AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences), ICMR (Indian Council for Medical Research), NICPR (National Institute of Cancer Prevention Research), NIC (National Informatics Centre) and the IndiaStack team at iSPIRT (India Software Product Industry Round Table) have collaborated with the programme.

This advanced solution will also be linked with Health Ministry’s other programmes to provide a strong foundation for inclusive health care service under Ayushman Bharat.