Intelehealth's origin story
Barhra is a typical village in rural West Bengal, India. People living in Barhra mainly rely on growing rice or working as daily-wage laborers in coal mines to earn a living. There is a government Primary Health Center (PHC) in the village, but the post of the medical officer is vacant. Barhra is not a preferred posting due to its remoteness. As is typical of rural Indian villages where the nearest doctor is miles away, people go to “quack” doctors, or to the two informal pharmacies in the village market when they need basic medical care. For anything more advanced than a cough and cold, they need to take a crowded bus to the nearest town to see a doctor, a trip which takes them all day and costs them a week’s wages including the travel, cost of the the doctor’s fees, medicines and tests. The situation in Barhra is typical of many Indian villages, and many rural areas around the world.
Intelehealth started out as a master's project in 2014 at the Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design at Johns Hopkins University. A group of students and faculty members along with a partner organization, JSV Innovations, set out to develop a primary care delivery model to serve the needs of Barhra.
The health workforce gap is acute all over the world. There simply aren’t enough doctors to meet the needs of the population, and they are mainly concentrated in urban cities. Amazing advances have been made in maternal and child health by task-shifting antenatal care, postnatal care and immunization to community health workers. In countries like Liberia, multipurpose workers even provide care for infectious diseases. But the healthcare needs of the population have changed with a growing incidence of non-communicable diseases.
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 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.
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 several teams of CBID students, project partners, clinical and public health expert mentors who worked on this project.
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-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 vision that the organization has set out to achieve - ethical, evidence-based, high-quality primary health care services for the people living in places like Barhra without proper access to health services.