S

Sirhaana

Empowering People on the First Step

S

Sirhaana

Empowering People on the First Step

The problem Sirhaana solves

Statement How might we get the Indian Urban Poor Population involved into the healthcare system & PHR through convenient and accessible healthcare by leveraging the available technologies and Humanizing the system.
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Due to the dire poverty in the Urban Poor Slums, very few can afford basic healthcare services. Even if they do, the health centres are at times, inaccessible, and chronically understaffed. The urban poor demographic generally avoids this very first step or tends to self-medicate (“gharelu nuske”,home remedies) instead. A casual approach at the first step increases the cost of healthcare and complications later leading to congestion in hospitals and distrust in the system.
We plan to educate and administer the locals on community first aid skills specific to their Basti(slums or jhuggis).
Sirhaana will provide the first aid care to mitigate minor injuries. A network of local respondents, college student volunteers and the Basti locals will be set up that will enable quick reach. Student volunteers will also have the provision of a smartphone and/or laptop to assist the locals to register on the system. The local respondent will be certified to administer first aid care and will also help people get on the PHR system with a smartphone enabled assisted PHR registry system.
We also have a strong backend system to manage the entire system along with the supply chain and helpline to ensure we never fall back and are able to give our best.
One thing that our process is designed to do is make people realise that having a Health ID in the PHR system is incredibly beneficial to them.

Challenges we ran into

A few challenges we came across were

  1. Not everyone trusted the existing healthcare system: People, especially the urban poor felt that they were wasting their time in huge lines in the government hospitals, which was also the reason why they refused going to hospitals altogether.
    We overcome this challenge by focusing on first aid. We wanted to build atop the existing trust that people have in their neighbours. We are building a model around the neighbours to get them trained in first aid so that they can then aid their neighbours with the same trust level.
  2. Reluctance of people to come forward to register for any new service: Not everyone will understand the advantages of a PHR and thus it will take a really long time to reach every person in India.
    We overcome this by trying to proactively approach people to register for the PHR. The local respondent can help people to get into the PHR when the person reaches to provide first aid. We utilise the power of word of mouth to expand PHR services.
  3. We are a team of energetic Undergraduates and as a result are very new to business flow. Designing the Money Flow and the business model of our idea for sustainability have been the most challenging aspects for us.
    We are overcoming this by trying a not for profit model and relying on donations to fund the extensive network that we will need.
  4. We are yet to implement the full-fledged prototype in the real world to gain direct user inputs.
    We have done extensive user study for the same and have received a positive response at the moment, we just need to test it on the field.

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