Carethics

Though India has achieved some great feats on the economic front in the past decade, it has not managed to pass on the benefits to the health care sector as desired. As per the source, some 700 million people in India still lack access to care by specialists, partly because four out of five specialists live in urban areas far from the large rural population.

At such times it is a pleasure to have institutes like the Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI) – not-for-profit organization to implement technology-based solutions to bridge this gap.

With its 108 emergency-service number, EMRI provides free medical, police and fire emergencies in a number of states such as Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Goa, Chennai, Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Assam. It operates 1,300 technology backed ambulances in the country side of the aforesaid states, with web-based applications connecting the mobile units to hospitals and physicians. However, it plans to go national by 2010 with more than 10,000 ambulances.

So far, more than 3,000 hospitals have become members of the rural outreach program; in the first year itself 3,00,000 emergencies have been serviced and 11,500 lives have been saved!