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In 2014, the availability of mobile phones and mobile data connectivity in rural areas meant that nothing was remote anymore. There were now ways to support these health workers with technology tools that enabled them to provide a more comprehensive range of primary health services, beyond just maternal and child health. Over the period of two years, JHU CBID design teams of students and faculty traveled to Barhra and set up a prototype “Rural Health Kiosk” that provided curative outpatient primary care services to the population. The project was supported by funding support from the Medtronic Foundation. The teleclinic was run by a community health worker who used a rudimentary version of the software platform to facilitate teleconsultations with remote doctors in Kolkata.
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This prototype eventually become the Intelehealth platform that was formally launched in 2017 and released in a open source format as a common good. Four members of the design team - Amal Afroz Alam, Emily Eggert, Neha Verma and Dr. Soumyadipta Acharya (left to right) - co-founded a non-profit, Intelehealth, Inc., to support the development and dissemination of the platform. The platform was a result of the contributions of generations several teams of CBID students, project partners, clinical and public health expert mentors who worked on this project. Intelehealth was possible because of the cumulative efforts of these innovative, disruptive and unreasonable thinkers and we'd like to acknowledge their efforts.
Over time the platform was adopted by other organizations. It has matured and more features and modules have been added to support health workers in other tasks and not just teleconsultation, including a full-fledged knowledge engine -enabled digital assistant to support task-shifting, screening, health education and referrals. The platform has also grown to include features and content to support both preventative and curative services, continuously striving to meet the original vision that the founders organization has set out to achieve - ethical, evidence-based, high-quality primary health care services for the people living in places like Barhra without adequate proper access to health services.