How an app is changing the healthcare scenario in Gujarat

GUJARAT HAS INTRODUCED many initiatives in the Health and Family Welfare Department, which have helped citizens to a great extent. In order to find out how successful the TeCHO+ app is and how it has brought a paradigm shift in the coverage and quality of health services, Express Computer's Vishwas Dass interacted with Dr Jayanti S Ravi, Principal Secretary, Health and Family Welfare Department, Government of Gujarat. The key features of TeCHO+ for the field workers include alerts and reminders for due health services, digital checklist to ensure compliance with standard clinical guidelines and decision tree triage for screening among others

Please tell us about the TeCHO+ project of the Department of Health and Family Welfare. How successful has the project been over the past few years?

Technology enabled Community Health Operations, better known as, TeCHO plus or TeCHO+ is an initiative of the Government of Gujarat in collaboration with Argusoft, Sewa Rural and UNICEF to further improve coverage and quality of health services using a state-of art mobile enabled public health solution that can help in achieving the sustainable developmental goals (SDGs) related to health, nutrition and wellbeing. This comprehensive health technology solution has two components - mobile and web application for tracking health services and health status of the citizens. It was initially a job aid used by the auxillary nurse midwives (ANMs) at the field, but now covers all cadres of field health workers of the health department as well as the supervisory cadres in the health facilities.

The key features of TeCHO+ for the field workers include alerts and reminders for due health services, digital checklist to ensure compliance with standard clinical guidelines, decision tree triage for screening and risk stratification of serious illnesses, customised treatment notifications based on risk stratification, and short video clips for counselling. The list of services that they have to provide are very clearly shown to them in an easy to use interface and since the application also works offline, they can view these and enter data even if there is no internet. They also can view auto generated reports of the work done by them instead of manually maintaining paper records.