HYDERABAD: The pilot round of the digital health profile project has screened approximately 20% and 23% of the target population in Sircilla and Mulugu districts respectively. This roughly translates to 1.34 lakh citizens in the two districts combined. According to officials, the process of testing and creating profiles has received a welcome response from citizens but has been a little slower than anticipated due to various reasons, including both technical and logistical.
“In Sircilla district, we have deployed over 149 teams and plan to add more on the ground to complete the screening. There are some technical issues arising at the hub level in terms of processing the reports, however we have been told we can increase more number of sample collections after the technical issues are rectified,” explained Dr A Suman Mohan Rao. The district has nearly 4,22,000 target population.
Similarly, in Mulugu district, technical issues were present, which are expected during the pilot phase of a project. However, here, with the population being more rural and focused on agriculture, they are often not present at the time health staff are visiting, requiring them to spend more time in the same areas. “Several people in the area are engaged in NREGA and Mahua flower picking work so our teams are required to visit them multiple times to cover all the residents in a given village,” added Dr Allam Appaiah. The target population here is 2,15,852. Both the districts, however, hope to finish the ambitious project of collecting over 90 samples and uploading the data of the reports by May 15 this year.
“Currently, we are only doing this work on working days and so we have finished 26 days of collection. We are given a total of 60 working days and hope to cover the target population. This data will be highly crucial for the two districts to even start specific programmes targeting Non-Communicable Diseases like diabetes, thyroid etc,” he added.