We spent the day today in the beautiful Indiana Dunes National Park. Today was the only day good enough for outdoor activity, considering that the area will see thunderstorms tomorrow and Monday, so we decided to make the best use of today.

The first few hours were relaxing. After those few hours, I needed something to engage myself in, as I decided not to take a dip into the cold water of Lake Michigan, unlike my son, who relished in the frigid water.

So, to engage myself, I started watching a Bollywood movie. The movie had a sub-story about one of the characters, a doctor, who, at some point in the story’s timeline, worked in a government hospital in a rural part of India.

In the story, a massive disease outbreak causes a severe oxygen shortage in government hospital systems. Despite trying her best, even trying to buy oxygen cylinders from her own salary, the doctor can not procure enough cylinders, and this leads to the death of numerous children. Later, the government “investigates” the incident and blames the doctor for the fiasco. The doctor is sent to jail.

Sounds dramatic? This part of the story is based on a true story in India in 2017. The doctor did go to jail. A separate and unbiased investigation later found that whatever lives were saved were saved because of the efforts of this doctor.

But what got me thinking beyond the plight of this poor doctor was the lack of oxygen cylinders and the unawareness surrounding this lack of availability until disaster struck. There was also a lack of transparency, and I wondered how technology could help bridge the visibility challenge. The most critical requirement behind this solution is the determination of state governments that govern these remote hospitals. The technical and process components are relatively simple.

The solution aims to provide public access to critical resources, like oxygen cylinders, across the state healthcare system in real time.

The “Right To Information” process already exists in India where you can petition any government department and request data. However, in many cases, the process may take weeks or months. When it comes to critical resources like healthcare, my npotion is that providing a full transparency, in real-time will ensure that the critical resources are managed efficiently. That is why, digitalization of RTI for healthcare related data is critical.

The process in figure above is simple. A near real-time inventory of critical medical supplies will be available in a centralized data base that can be accessed through a portal by anone registered on the portal. Now if person A sees that the number of Oxygen cylinders is down to 5, against a required minimum of 50, in hospital C, they can simply click a button that will help them bring that to the attention of the management at that government hospital.

The critical technology aspect here is maintaining the real-time inventory data. Remember that we are not doing this for all medical supplies but critical ones like Oxygen cylinders. Inexpensive variation of RFID tags can be leveraged to keep account. A simplified example has been shown in the figure below.

Where there is a will, there is a way. This holds for both public and private (commercial) sectors. Technology exists for the majority of challenges that have been plaguing us for decades. Resources, like money, exist as well. What is needed is a genuine will to solve the problem.