These ‘health ATMs’ serve as doctors where there are none

Photo credit: Pixabay.

It’s time for your yearly checkup. You go to your local clinic, walk in, sit down, and get the full battery of tests – vital signs, glucose, cholesterol, other blood tests, and body mass calculations. The doctor uses a stethoscope and checks your skin over for any abnormalities you have noticed. When you’re finished, you get a printout of all of your test readings – with the option of emailing it to yourself and another physician – and you leave.

The whole process costs around US$15 and takes four to five minutes, because – save a little help from the medical attendant standing to the side – all of this has been done by a machine.

A medical ATM is now doing precisely that in India. It’s a machine that takes most of your primary care reading and connect you with a doctor over video chat for further consultation. Plus it’s lending a hand to more rural areas in India where full-time doctors are rare.

The check-up ATM works over a slow 2G or 3G connection.

YOLO Health began using its ATM system about eight months ago and has 17 of the machines in circulation. Some are being used by corporates in Mumbai. However, most of the machines reside in areas including Kolkata and rural regions like Karnataka’s Kolar District, and the Sukma and Dantewada districts in the state of Chattisgarh. That’s how co-founders Dhilly Babu, Shreyans Gandhi, and Arpit Mishra mainly want the apparatus used.

“YOLO” stands for “you only live once,” today’s trendy way of telling people to “seize the day.” When applied to healthcare, it takes on a more sobering meaning. As of last year, India has one doctor for every 11,528 people in government hospitals. While the number of doctors in India is rising, it’s not rising fast enough to take care of everyone. Lots of startups have popped up to try to shorten the distance between doctor and patient via video consultation, such as SeeDoc and JustDoc.

The prevalence of lifestyle diseases in the country – conditions like diabetes or hypertension that require close monitoring from a physician – is also rising, with 25 percent reported at risk of dying from such a disease before the age of 70. The type of monitoring required often involves looking at blood readings and other preventative measures carried out by a primary care physician.

That’s exactly the kind of care that Dhilly and the team believes can be outsourced to the ATM.

Taking healthcare out of cities

A patient sitting at the ATM gets walked through the specific tests and services it offers. To help out, especially in rural areas where residents speak a dialect, an attendant sits closeby to answer a patient’s questions or help with tasks like putting on the ATM’s blood pressure cuff correctly. The helper doesn’t have to be a trained medical professional at all – he or she just needs to speak the local language.

“We want to remove the high skilled requirement in these locations and train a very very basic guy,” Dhilly tells Tech in Asia. The person can be a school dropout and still be able to operate the system.

The ATM’s services can function over a slow 2G or 3G connection as finding data service in remote parts of the country is difficult.

“We also operate an offline model for locations with no to poor connectivity,” says Dhilly. “Here, all health screening and video consultations […] could be performed offline without any connection.” In this case, the video can be recorded and sent later when the connection is back – or when the power comes back on.

The healing touch