In its bid to enhance primary healthcare services for crores of Indians across the country, Protean (formerly NSDL e-Gov), India’s leading e-governance institution, launched its healthcare solution ‘Protean Clinic’, along with the dIAP programme of the Indian Academy of Pediatrics. The system will be offered to IAP’s 35,000 member pediatricians and subsequently to all other OPD clinics, enabling early diagnosis, specialised treatment, and superior patient engagement capabilities to prevent, diagnose, treat and manage diseases better, both in-clinic and at-home.
OPD clinics using the system will be certified and promoted in their locations as Protean-certified SMART clinics, offering specialised services with the highest privacy and security standards. Protean intends to connect the network to the National Digital Health Mission of the Government of India, solving the country’s lack of accurate and real-time epidemiology data, thus empowering healthcare policy and standards nationwide.
Crores of Indians suffer from late or incorrect diagnosis and treatment due to India’s severe shortage of specialists and the lack of specialised services at OPD clinics. OPD clinics also cannot extend their reach to patients’ homes. There is a pressing need to make specialist capabilities available at OPD clinics for early diagnosis, local treatment, and timely referrals under specialist advice. Specialised services are also needed to prevent or manage lifestyle diseases and many chronic conditions. In addition, OPD clinics need patient outreach and high-tech medical devices to ensure timely detection and intervention even before the patient comes to the Clinic.
Protean Clinic enables doctors to engage with their patient community to maintain timely checks, detect red flags, intervene and diagnose early, and treat special conditions under specialist advice. The Clinics will also offer specialised assessment, preventive, and management services for chronic diseases.
Protean aims to equip tens of thousands of local health workers with high-tech devices using its captive network of over 44,000 locations. This will enable OPD clinics nationwide to offer at-home services for assisted telemedicine (remote physical examinations), wellness visits, rapid diagnostics, measurement, and monitoring. Essentially, the platform will extend the Clinic’s services, beating boundaries and allowing the doctors to care beyond clinics.
Suresh Sethi, Managing Director and CEO, Protean, said, “Our country faces the task of rapidly upgrading its OPD clinic capabilities to diagnose early and treat locally under specialist advice and with specialised technology-enabled services. Our latest venture aims to provide better primary healthcare facilities to all Indians on the back of strong technology infrastructure. We are delighted to partner with the Indian Academy of Pediatrics and extend our state-of-the-art platform to all its doctors for better child healthcare.”
The current, incoming, and immediate past presidents of IAP, Dr. Piyush Gupta, Dr. Remesh Kumar, and Dr. Bakul Parekh, said, “There is a great need to expand specialist capacity nationwide and to enable general pediatric clinics with specialised services, diagnostic support, and high-tech diagnostic devices, thereby improving health outcomes for over 100 million children. We are glad to partner with Protean eGov in this programme for the children of India.”
