In 2009, Sathish Babu Ratakonda was working for the Royal Army of Oman, when he suffered a life-threatening allergic response called anaphylactic shock. He had swelling and hives all over his body, low blood pressure, and dilated blood vessels. He couldn’t talk and his colleagues were not aware of his health conditions. As he recovered from it, his thoughts turned to how much worse it could be without a complete medical record of patients being available. That’s where and when, he decided to develop a solution for addressing this need. But he also realised that medical records maintained in silos could make situations worse, so he decided to create movable medical records – i.e. they are available wherever the patients are living or being treated. This is called a ‘Health Information Exchange’. Sathish told Networked India:
Our project mycarevault is a Health Information Exchange for health data, and is the backbone for the entire Indian healthcare system. It has Electronic Health Records (EHR) for healthcare providers and entities and Personal Health Records (PHR) of the patients.”
He explained, “mycarevault EHRs will be available almost for free to doctors and healthcare facilities, who are authorized to work in India and PHRs will also be distributed, again, almost free, for patients in India. PHRs when integrated with EHRs can help doctors to understand a patient’s complication with a holistic approach, and patients can participate in the care.”
“Mycarevault comes with scheduling inter-operability, Unified Health Data Semantics (UHDS) ™, and Nationwide e-Health Architecture (NeHA) ™. UHDS is a medical linguistic tool, which helps interpret the medical language between two IT systems. UHDS has around 1.3 million medical concepts, which are related to daily use in the clinical practice. NeHA architecture is an inter-operable middleware framework, which can help different IT systems communicate with each other and interpret the messages.”
In India, approximately 97% of health-related technologies are adopted, but those adopted systems cannot talk to each other, due to a huge number of factors. One of them being ‘health language’ barriers. Sathish acknowledged that, “the most challenging part for me is finding a solution for creating a unified health language to communicate with other IT systems, so the health data can flow freely between IT systems.” And he seems to have overcome this because he has completed “two years of research and one year of alpha and beta testing in a government setup, at a remote place.”
He says, “I feel very satisfied, when patients walk in with our medical UUID cards, and get care faster than they expected and get testing done in no time. In the beta stage, we have issued 20,000 RFID enabled medical UUID cards to patients and served nearly 1.8 lakh patients.”
Written for Ericsson's blog - Networked India.
