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In an interaction with ETHealthworld, Raghavendra Prasad, Founder of Project StepOne shares his experience and key challenges of driving the telemedicine project during the COVID-19 pandemic. Edited excerpts:
Q: In your view, how has the acceptance of telemedicine evolved during the COVID-era? Do you think that the Telemedicine Practice Guidelines 2020 were a major factor for its acceptance among doctors and patients?
Raghavendra Prasad: The acceptance of telemedicine has greatly improved amongst all stakeholders, patients/consumers, doctors and government alike. Patients and doctors were left with no choice but to teleconsult during the lockdowns, which led to many discovering the process which largely for most common scenarios can become the default mode of doctor consultation, thereby making a doctor visit only necessitated by specific scenarios which require an in-person consultation. The lockdown and the lack of other options was the bigger factor than the release of the telemedicine practice guidelines in March 2020.
Q: What have been your key learnings through the initiatives undertaken by StepOne during the COVID fight?
Raghavendra Prasad: StepOne has managed to help over 3.6 Million Covid affected people during the second wave with different interventions, we are working with 20 State governments. The scale and breadth of the interventions make it hard to summarise the learnings into one or two – however, the number one key learning is that technology can really boost public health and go a long way in making the dream of universal healthcare access a reality. The other key learning is government and citizens can work together as one team seamlessly complementing each other to help citizens in need – while government and civil society working together is not new, the seamlessness of the teamwork, the scale and the impact due to the same are extremely encouraging learnings. Of course, the innate kindness in people to help others, as seen by a large number of volunteer professionals with StepOne is fantastic and the fact that kindness is scalable is another key learning.
Q: How is StepOne preparing for the future COVID waves?
Raghavendra Prasad: StepOne is working on multiple fronts to be better prepared for future Covid waves, but foremost is to help avoid the adverse effects of future waves by getting large number of people vaccinated – helping governments combat vaccine hesitancy and assist in the use of technology to simplify the vaccination process itself. The need to create increased hospital capacity is also very important towards which StepOne has been working to donate critical care equipment to public hospitals via several CSR efforts and foundations. In addition, we are looking to get more volunteers mobilised across all streams i.e. doctors, medics, corporate and citizen volunteers, mental health counsellors and of course other professionals to help StepOne with technology, product, HR, operations, marketing and data sciences.
Q: What are the challenges being faced by project StepOne in providing voluntary teleconsultations?
Raghavendra Prasad: The key challenge is the inability to predict the volunteer efforts on a particular day – we get a specific number of cases to assist which often is hard to predict on a daily basis, we have to get all those patients help by volunteer doctors in the shortest time period possible. We are trying to address this by getting volunteers to pledge a certain number of cases they can complete everyday, which will help us bring predictability to our daily operations. In addition, we are also always recruiting more volunteers as at peak caseload, we need lot more efforts per volunteer and also more number of volunteers. Our ability to use technology to inform volunteers of the shortfall in volunteers and ushering them to assist whenever it happens is something we are working on.
Q: What are project StepOne’s expansion plans going forward?
Raghavendra Prasad: StepOne’s current focus is fully on mitigating the impact of future Covid waves in as many states as possible, so expanding geographically is something important for that. In addition, we are also working to bring newer interventions to deal with long covid, mucormycosis and also select non Covid interventions around women and children’s health.