Data – The Solution to Improved Child Healthcare in India

The healthcare industry historically has generated large amounts of data, which is driven by record keeping, compliance, regulatory requirements and patient care. As the healthcare today is more of patient-centric care, there is growing acceptance that data is the foundation to better and improved healthcare delivery.

With the advent of rapid digitization in healthcare industry, it has become easy to analyze this large amount of data captured, recognize patterns from which conclusions and decisions can be drawn on the various aspects of healthcare, especially child health. By combining and effectively using big data, following potential benefits can be extracted:

• Analyzing disease patterns to improve child health surveillance;
• Improved and accurate development of more targeted vaccines, e.g., choosing the annual influenza strains;
• Identifying the side effects of any vaccination. Recently in some European countries: 1 in 10 girls given HPV vaccine suffered ‘adverse’ reaction (Source: http://ow.ly/BZ10300jU2e)
• Turning large amounts of data into actionable information that can be used to identify gaps and provide services in child nourishment and vaccinations.

Analyzing such kind of data can help in formulating various policies and measures that may help in better outcome for child health. For example – assessing the Fenton & WHO growth charts in a particular community or region can help in identifying patterns of any normal or abnormal growth in that community. Once identified, regulatory bodies can formulate measures to strength the child growth within that community or region.

Healthcare organizations can improve quality of care coordination and services, power accountability and personalized medicine across the ecosystem, create a competitive advantage for increased market share and reduce costs by having a data-centric focus. By enabling the sharing of quality data across multiple systems IT organizations can provide their users with new ways of achieving their desired outcomes. Lastly, proper data management within healthcare industry is the key to attain MDG related to child and maternal health and unleashing the potential of digital healthcare.

Rotavirus vaccine - now a part of country's immunization programme

Introduction to Rotavirus

Rotavirus is a virus that causes gastroenteritis, an infection of the intestines and is one of the most common causes of diarrhea in children under the age of five. Studies have shown that nearly every child catches the infection before their fifth birthday. If infected, the baby may start to encounter the below symptoms in about 18 to 36 hours:

• Low grade fever
• Nausea and vomiting
• Mild to severe diarrhea, that usually lasts for three to seven days
• Abdominal cramps

Launch of Rotavirus Vaccine

The rotavirus vaccine has now been made a part of country’s universal immunization programme (UIP) for four states initially - Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Odisha with expansion to entire country in phased manner. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends the rotavirus vaccine as the only prevention and control measure for diarrhea. Most babies who get the vaccine won't get rotavirus diarrhea at all, and almost all of them will be protected from severe rotavirus diarrhea. 

On March 9th 2016, PM Narendra Modi launched India’s first indigenously developed Rotavirus vaccine “Rotavac”. With this launch, the vaccine is expected to bring down the infant deaths due to rotavirus diarrhea in India and across the globe. 

As every hospital’s immunization schedule differs in India, iCHR has the capability to adapt any immunization schedule according to the hospital’s requirement. If your hospital has captured rotavirus vaccine as a mandate vaccine, and is still not a part of your hospital information system (HIS); integrate iCHR in your hospital premises for better management of child health records. Contact us to know more on ichr@oxyent.com or 011-40644232.

How will Implementing an Automated Child Health Record benefit my Hospital?

The Healthcare Industry has evolved rapidly in the past few years; adopting state-of-art infrastructure, robotics, information systems, IoT devices, etc. With such advancements, the next step for hospitals is to focus on adopting technology for each specialized departments like Maternity, Pediatrics, Cardiology, etc. and sharing the captured data with their patients so as to maintain a healthy doctor-patient relationship, providing credibility and retaining the patients for long-term. 

In Pediatrics today, the child health records in the hospitals are handed over to the parents as paper based records which are not formally maintained. Parents in most of the cases either misplace these records or do not carry them each time when visiting the doctor for administering the vaccination to the child. Hospitals do not maintain OPD record for vaccination and hence there is no way of recovering the vaccination history, leading to confusion and panic.

What can a Hospital do to minimize this?

Every hospital can adapt to a system that keeps track of a child’s vaccination schedule, which helps parents to get timely reminders and notifications of vaccinations, digitally plot growth charts including both Fenton & WHO chart so that it is easy for doctors to educate parents about their child’s growth and give instructions as and when needed.

With this in mind, we introduce everyone to iCHR - India’s 1st Hospital linked Integrated Child Health Record – a revolutionary concept of automated vaccination record and growth monitoring, for your precious child. iCHR is up and running currently in Fortis La Femme, Jaypee Hospital, Paras Hospital, Bhagat Chandra Hospital & Alchemist Hospital. Our goal with iCHR is to attain the sustainable development goals and reduce the child mortality rate. It helps in keeping track of all the vaccinations according to the schedule recommended by the Indian Association of Pediatrics. The application offers the following benefits:

Benefits for Doctors

• Cloud based patient management system.
• Maintaining the visit history of patients which saves record keeping and maintenance cost.
• Paperless and secured vaccination record available anytime, anywhere in the world. 
• Brand documentation of vaccine.
• Digital plotting of growth parameters on WHO and Fenton Charts.

Benefits for Parents

• Paperless and secured Vaccination Record available anytime, anywhere on your mobile phone.
• Interactive growth chart on parent’s mobile phone to track growth of preterm and term babies.
• Easy to understand.
• Each hospital visit details on tap of a button.
• Automatic vaccination due date calculator.
• Timely vaccination reminders and notifications for the parents.

Lastly through iCHR we are helping a hospital to enhance the retainer-ship with their patient through timely vaccination reminders, notifications for promotional and announcements by the hospital, which helps in engaging the patient not just within the hospital premises, but also outside the hospital. If this sounds interesting and you are still not on board, contact us to know more on ichr@oxyent.com or 011-40644232 for further queries and we’ll be more than happy to help!

Malnutrition in India and how iCHR is helping

Birth of a child is perhaps one of life’s most treasured moments for every parent. Protecting the child’s health and ensuring proper nutrition and growth are the only important goal for any parent. In July 2015, the Government of India, released malnutrition figures from the Rapid Survey on Children (RSoC) data that was collected in 2013-14. According to this report:

• 29.4% of children (aged less than three years) fall in underweight category (low in weight for their age),
• 15% were wasted (low weight for their height)
• 38.7% were stunted (low in height for age)

Introduction to Malnutrition

The Dorland Medical Dictionary defines Malnutrition or Malnourishment as a condition that results from unbalanced diet causing various health problems. This unbalanced diet results from eating a diet in which nutrients are either not enough or are too much. Simply put, malnutrition can be categorized as under-nutrition (Underweight) and over-nutrition (Obesity). Malnutrition is caused by various conditions or circumstances like:

• Poor Diet
• Food Shortages
• Food Prices and Irregular Food Distribution
• Lack of Breastfeeding
• Lack of monitoring vital parameters of child such as: age, height, weight and head circumference

Malnourishment at an early age leads to reduced physical and mental development of the child. Hence, the first two years of a child’s life are critical and is termed as “Window of Opportunity”. There are various parameters to identify malnutrition in a child, the most crucial being monitoring the vital parameters up to 12 years of age:

• Head circumference
• Height
• Weight

How iCHR is helping?

iCHR is the India’s 1st Hospital linked Integrated Child Health Record – a revolutionary concept of automated vaccination record and growth monitoring, for your precious child. Our goal with iCHR is to attain the sustainable development goals and reduce the child mortality rate. It helps in keeping track of all the vital parameters up to 12 years of age responsible for monitoring the growth of a child such as:

• Head circumference
• Height 
• Weight
• BMI 

The parameters are plotted on WHO based charts, which help the child’s pediatrician to analyze any risk of malnutrition, and the statistics can also be used by ICDS for future studies. 

Case Study

Fortis Le Femme, being the major implementer of iCHR application gave insight on patients whose growth improved immensely with the utilization of the growth charts, namely:

• Fenton Growth Chart for Preterm Babies
• WHO Growth Chart for Term Babies

The chart below depicts the Weight versus Age vital parameters for a preterm baby on the Fenton Growth Chart which illustrates that growth of the baby at 46 weeks falls under 3 centile which is a bit on the lower side. With proper instructions and guidelines of the pediatrician, the growth of the child can be improved. 

Fenton Chart – Weight versus Age

The chart below depicts the Weight versus Age vital parameters for a term baby on the WHO Growth Chart illustrating that growth of the baby from 2 months to 15 months of age falls below 3 centile which is on the lower side. 

WHO Growth Chart – Weight versus Age

In both the above cases, with timely intervention and proper instructions of the pediatrician improved the growth of the child and helped the parents to come out of fear of retarded growth for their child.

We at iCHR are profound & proficient in providing the platform at your doorstep starting from installation, training the end users, support and maintenance of the application. We make sure that you do not fall in traps & make the best of decisions for the hospital and the patients. If this sounds interesting and you are still not on board, contact us to know more on ichr@oxyent.com or 011-40644232 for further queries and we’ll be more than happy to help!