Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Intel continues to play with global health
Back in July, I wrote about Intel's plans to make health care more techno-savvy. Yesterday, I came across a headline in India eNews: "Intel helping spread school health." Thanks to Intel, a girls' high school in the southern state of Tamil Nadu became the first school in India to have a health monitoring program; the program will soon be launched nationwide.
Data on health parameters--like nutrition deficiencies, eye sight, height, weight--of each child will be captured on a daily and weekly basis. The system will generate a monthly report from the entered data, which will be sent by e-mail to the district administration's desk and the district health officer, and forwarded to the health, human resource and education ministries of the state and the union government.
Intel CEO Craig R. Barrett was there to inaugurate the pilot project, as well as a tele-health project at a hospital. The Health Minister who accompanied Barrett said,
"Digital health solutions are the most appropriate tools for achieving our objective of providing healthcare to the poorest of our citizens in the remotest of areas."
The minister went on to explain that the tele-medicine project connected the primary and tertiary health centers in the entire Villupuram district to the Government General Hospital Tindivanam. Through the program, a patient and doctor in Tindivanam can now get access to reports and assistance in far away New York or elsewhere. Five more such tele-medicine hubs will be set up in districts around India as pilot projects by 2008, and 50 of India's districts will soon have tele-medicine hubs. As Barrett said,"'It is technology that can connect this poor town to the world's best health care system.'"
For more information, see the Intel press release on Barrett's visit.