India’s first automated COVID-19 surveillance app launched by Telangana

Hyderabad: Telangana’s public health and family welfare department has developed India’s first automated COVID – 19 monitoring system app which will be used to identify, track, and monitor patients, undertake line surveillance and provide real-time analytics to Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao and the health department.

The app, developed in association with Vera Smart Healthcare, a US and Hyderabad-based start-up, provides facts and figures to the stakeholders to analyse. The app, which was developed in three days, can be used by 1,500 to 2,000 ASHA workers at a time to make calls. It also has an interactive chatbot feature to ensure that the suspected and positive COVID-19 cases are under constant surveillance. The callers will also remind the patient to follow social distancing and take the prescribed medicines.

The data thus updated by the ASHA workers in the app will be received by 4,800 employees of public health centers in the state. Through them, the data will move to the district medical health officer, who will then take charge and the data will be further sent to different health department employees based on their ranking. Apart from this, the app can also be used to track people under home quarantine.

Dharma Teja Nukarapu, the founder and CEO of Vera Healthcare, said, “Among the vital features of the app is geotagging and GPS tracking of people under home quarantine to ensure that s/he is not breaching the quarantine norms. With instant trace and trackability, accurate information is sent to the authorities even if there is a breach. Every detail reported reaches the Chief Minister’s Office through various updaters like the ASHA workers, doctors, police, and bureaucrats.”

The director of public health, Dr. G. Srinivas Rao, said, “Vera's centralised COVID-19 monitoring system is a timely innovation and its effective surveillance has eased our work. Its meticulous tech-enabled method to collate vital data at the click of a button empowers active associates across the state, from the hierarchical polity to bureaucracy to the frontline ASHA and ANM workers. The digital platform also erases human errors and enables improvised surveillance.”

Earlier, the start-up helped create detailed health profiles for more than 50,000 people in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu in a record number of days. Vera has also introduced the first-ever mobile hospital in India to make health care more accessible to people in rural areas.