Healthcare just an SMS away, in Kerala
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COMMENTS 
Using technology to improve healthcare, Dr SMS provides users with instant health-related information
Information is a scarce commodity in India, but mobile phones are not. Marrying the two, the Kerala State Information Technology Mission (KSITM) has introduced a free SMS-based information access service that provides local addresses and phone numbers of health facilities.
All that a user has to do is type ‘health’, her pin code, her health concern, and send it to a pre-designated number. Within minutes, she will receive an SMS listing the addresses and phone numbers of health facilities, hospitals and doctors in the area. The service is also available on the Internet, at www.drsms.kerala.gov.in.
Dr SMS is a free service, and one of 20 that mobile users in Kerala will be able to access when the state launches a mobile platform in July 2010. “We want to create a database on the mobile,” says Dr Rathan U Kelkar, Director, KSITM, an autonomous body that implements e-governance projects for the state government.
Currently, only eight of Kerala’s 14 districts can use Dr SMS but the service will be extended to the remaining six districts by August 2010. Around 72% of Kerala’s population owns mobile phones; Dr Kelkar says he gets 1,500 hits per day.
The service is likely to work well in a state like Kerala which has a highly literate population and a comparatively sound healthcare infrastructure so that once a facility is identified, access to it and receiving the required care is not as much of a problem as it is in other parts of the country where hospitals are scarce and quality of service poor.
KSITM is expected to soon launch other health-related services such as health alerts, in case of a health emergency such as a dengue or diarrhoea outbreak, and voice-based calls that route the call of a person in need of blood to a registered blood donor.
Source: http://www.ehealthonline.org, June 2010
http://southasia.oneworld.net, June 2010