DR. PREETHA REDDY

Every piece of action we do today is powered by technology. But only 30% of women in India have access to technology. There is a huge disparity, a huge paradox – there's phenomenal advancement in technology in one hand, but on the other side, there's no good clean drinking water for many. This is probably a global phenomenon, and that is what leadership is all about, that if we can make a difference in places like this, if we can use technology to give them safe drinking water, make the planet a better place, then we would have done our job.
India is one of the largest countries to use tele-medicine to interact with physicians in remote locations, give them a second opinion service, try to find the onset of disease and to stop it before it becomes an epidemic.
Private enterprises like Apollo, bring in systems of e-learning where they have 20,000-30,000 hours of content and use technology to take it to remote locations, so there are schools of nursing, nursing training centres, which are for skills development in smaller locations. There are trainers from John Hopkins from USA, technology from Stanford and all these classes are taken to the remotest locations in India that is where technology has impacted. Another application is use of palmtops to send data from various locations to central point, say, birth-data, which is actually saving lives. Mobile phones today can be walking doctors – you can get SMS alerts to remind you to take your vitamins, you can carry your medical record, your blood group on the mobile phone.
She said that she is responsible for 8000 beds and with technology she can check if the parameters in any one of the centres are doing well, are there infection rates high in a hospital, etc. So, technology has really touched and saved lives in healthcare.

Sound Bites

• Each one of us have a role to play, each one of us can go out and in our own sphere of capacity can make a change.
• Maybe if doctor has gone to play golf, if there is a problem in the ICU, he/she can use the iPad to do a virtual visit and check on the patient parameters, give instructions so that lives can be saved.
• The high tech and high touch have to go together like the Yin and Yang.