Highlights Of #CaringForIndia Telethon: An Initiative To Assist Healthcare Workers In Their Fight Against Coronavirus

Cloudphysician has partnered with us to take care of certain parts of the state with the real time monitoring of all these high risk cases in the ICU and with their intensivists in the back-end. It has really helped in augmenting the local resources which are available and also it acts like a force multiplier, so high quality health care is available and to guide the local manpower. There are both doctors there and nurses who are monitoring the patients. So this has helped in micro managing the patients but with a remote approach and also the same intensivits can handle more patients at the same time.

Today we are working very closely with hospitals in districts in Karnataka and Maharashtra and we are actively engaging with other state governments and other hospitals in other states as well, including Orissa, Bihar, Andaman and Nicobar Islands. These are all states that have similar problems in the healthcare delivery system for ICU patients. And our solution can be used in all of these states and many more going forward to help improve the outcomes of patients.

Back in March this year, we at InnAccel realised that non-invasive ventilation would be a critical and life-saving technology for respiratory support for COVID patients in hospital. Given that there were no indigenous solutions available, we moved rapidly on developing a SARSPRO - system that provides both HFNC & CPAP modes of non-invasive ventilation for COVID patients. 

In parallel, we also developed India's first CPAP helmet interface for safe ventilation of COVID patients in collaboration with Thermax Global and doctors at Narayana Health in Bangalore. Both products were developed in a record time of 4 months and are now commercially available and in fact over 100 SARSPRO systems and about 600 helmet systems are being deployed in hospitals across India in August alone. 

I would like to mention ACT's generous and timely support which has been crucial to the development launch and scaleup of this critical technology and has given us this opportunity to serve our nation at this time of need.

We know that the manner in which the disease progresses, almost 80% of the people who are infected recover without treatment necessary at all. The 20% that do need treatment, we also know that about 80% of those actually recover with basic oxygen therapy which comprises low flow oxygen and high flow oxygen - well before they need ventilation.

We started working in the first week of May with one of the governments and thereafter we have worked with multiple governments. A total of about 50,000+ COVID positive patients have been monitored by us, of which 45,000 have been discharged which means they are fine and back to normal life. The balance 5,000 are still being monitored. A total of 3%, in fact less maybe 2.5% patients, had to be hospitalised. All the others that is 97.5% patients have recovered from home or continued to be monitored. This is a huge benefit for the healthcare ecosystem.

The burden of moving more and more people into COVID care centres, or into hospitals, is minimised. And those that need real attention are getting attention. The healthy people are not sitting in COVID care centres or hospitals. The people who are falling sick are able to get access to hospitals and beds.

The impact I think has been massive. Everybody is speaking about the Delhi model. We are just lucky and very proud and privileged to have been a small part of it. I think we connected to hundreds and thousands of patients. If you think that RNought is anywhere between 2-3, connecting to about 90,000 patients in Delhi, I think it's more than 100,000 now, if you see the RNought is 2.5, you prevented 2.5 lakh new infections because we made sure that these people either stayed at home or went to hospital. And did not keep roaming around, did not go out, did not become super spreaders.

In Delhi, Project StepOne is helping the Delhi government in the fight against COVID in terms of mobilising donors for plasma and also helping donors to be matched with the right recipients. The intervention in Delhi was enabled by the government when it set up the plasma bank in ILBS which is a Delhi govt owned hospital. And they were not able to get enough donors to come forward and donate inspite of a lot of campaigns and that is when they requested StepOne. And what we started doing was, we started having the volunteer doctors from StepOne talk to each of these donors personally and get them to come down and donate.

 

When someone turns positive, there are two reactions - they continue their life as if nothing happened. And the other extreme is they utterly panic and do things they shouldn't - rushing to a hospital and demanding a bed. So a call from a doctor will help subdue those reactions - those who didn't care were being counselled by the doctors. And those who panicked, they would calm their nerves and help them to think more rationally. This relationship went on until the time the positive person recovered. So there were deep bonds between the volunteer doctors and the citizens and the impact of that was immeasurable.

Thank you for recognising the role of healthcare givers. Healthcare workers are still in dire need of personal protective gears. Although the reproductive factor of the pandemic has improved but let us not forget that it is a patchy pandemic, the geographical area of pandemic can change. We have to keep watching and not let our guards down.