Tuesday, May 22, 2012

SimplyDoc

Over the last couple of weeks, we have been hacking around with healthcare data in India. It is quite surprising to see the poor quality of data that we in India have about our healthcare system.

There is hardly any validated, current information about the distribution of doctors and healthcare facilities in different locations. Even the Medical Council of India, the only centralized body which collates data about health facilities in India, is supposedly one-quarter inaccurate. I believe that this is an understatement, since I doubt if the database (which has over 9L entries starting from the 1960s) has ever been thoroughly validated.

So in order to improve the quality and currency of information, we have started geocoding available information from multiple sources on the presence of healthcare facilities in the country, and validating it to the extent possible.

We've hashed together a quick piece of code to put out what we have currently and the result is SimplyDoc (http://www.simplyDoc.in) - a simple platform that provides information about the closest healthcare facilities to you (using the browser's geoip to determine your location), or for any location that you specify.

Currently the data coverage is largely restricted to Bangalore and Mumbai, and our confidence on the accuracy of information uploaded is about 75%. We will continue to clean, validate and upload as much of the healthcare data as we can into the system and improve the quality of the system over time.

If any of you out there have any feedback or comments, or would like to validate any of the information available, please feel free to drop us a note - here or at vasant[at]simplydoc.in or tweet to us at @SimplyDoc

2 comments:

Abhinav said...

Hey Vasanth.. Found Simplydoc quite cool.. What would add more value is obviously some classification - paediatrician, orthopedist .. Typically when we are looking for a doctor, it is an emergency and we want to find the right type of doctor fast.. Any plans of adding such classifications ?

Vasant said...

Thanks Abhinav. Yes, in the process of such a classification, and augmenting the database too.