Recovery Within Reach

A handful of startups are using technology and on-ground interventions to strengthen rural primary health care, but impact might be limited without government intervention

- Divya J Shekhar

Growing up in a family of doctors in a village in Rajasthan’s Jhalawar district, Shreyans Mehta knew that it is loyalty that often creates legacy in rural health care. In the absence of trustworthy doctors nearby, most villagers spent between ₹800 and ₹1,000 to go to cities for treatment, while others suffered at the hands of local quacks. So when his father could not go to the hospital to see patients because of a slip disc in 2014, Mehta made sure people could reach him over phone and video. The experience prompted him to travel across villages in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Bihar to find answers to a couple of questions: To what extent could technology improve accessibility of health care in remote rural areas, and how can it be scaled up?

Mehta says visits to these villages and meetings with local public health officials made him realise that neither the people nor the government had any health care records or data. “I wanted to find a solution to help villagers find local doctors from similar cultural backgrounds who can understand them, and whom the patients can trust. I even wanted to help people digitise their records, so that it becomes easier to identify and predict health trends,” he says.

The 30-year-old Mehta also understood that any health care solution in rural areas cannot just solve one problem. “If I help people consult a doctor, but don’t improve their access to medicines and followups, they will end up going to the cities again,” he says. So, along with friends and fellow engineers Nikhil Baheti and Saida Dhanvath, Mehta launched MedCords in 2017 in Kota, Rajasthan.