Smart Health & Wellness Centre (PHC)
Ensuring healthy lives
- About 930 million people worldwide are at risk of falling into poverty due to out-of-pocket health spending of 10% or more of their household budget.
- Scaling up primary health care (PHC) interventions across low and middle-income countries could save 60 million lives and increase average life expectancy by 3.7 years by 2030.
PHC (Primary Healthcare centre) provides the ‘programmatic engine’ for UHC (Universal Health Coverage), the health-related SDGs3 (Sustainable Development Goals) and health security. PHC is the most inclusive, equitable, cost-effective and efficient approach to enhance people’s physical and mental health, as well as social well-being. Evidence of the wide-ranging impact of investment in PHC continues to grow around the world, particularly in times of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
PHC is also critical to make healthcare system more resilient to situations of crisis, more proactive in detecting early signs of epidemics and more prepared to act early in response to surges in demand for services. Although the evidence is still evolving there is widespread recognition that PHC is the “front door” of the health system and provides the foundation for the strengthening of the essential public health functions to confront public health crises such as COVID-19.
Smart PHC is a step forward in the way personal care can be delivered. The patients can get quick point-of-care diagnostics & preventive health screening as well as get to consult with a healthcare professional face-to-face via video screen, ensuring the patients get quality personalized treatment. This concept is designed as a first step in a series of activities to revolutionise healthcare delivery at primary care level thereby achieving UHC and SDG3.
Impact:
Smart PHC holds the promise to significantly impact some of the most challenging problems of our current healthcare system: access to quality care, cost effective delivery, and distribution of limited medical experts. It can change the current paradigm of care and allow for improved access and improved health outcomes in cost effective ways.
Earlier, getting a preventive health check-up or an appointment with a healthcare provider used to mean calling to get an appointment, waiting weeks for an opening, going out of the way and travelling to visit a clinic in the demographic network. Utilizing our state of-the-art medical kiosk, the patient will be able to get a quick preventive health screening or a face-to-face conversation with a healthcare professional (Super-Specialist/ Specialist based at Government Hospital/ DHC) via an additional telemedicine facility. This applies to walk-in patients as well, who through the kiosk can free up valuable time & capacity of Allied Healthcare workers for the purposes of performing initial screening.
