Karnataka based org tracks patients' SMSes on truant doctors

Getting to a doctor in a city in India can be fairly simple, however in rural parts of the country, medical care can be complicated. Not only are healthcare facilities sometimes difficult to reach, doctors in these facilities might come once or twice a week, and a lot of times they do not show up at all. A Karnataka-based organization, the Indo-Dutch Project Management Society (IDPMS) explains this phenomenon by the fact that doctors get paid whether they show up to work or not. They found that doctors working at public healthcare centers, which provide relatively cheaper healthcare to rural populations sometimes only work 4 hours per day and remain entirely unavailable for 100 days in a year. These doctors are meant to be at work for five and a half days each week and be on call full time. This results in economically disadvantaged individuals needing to access private and more expensive healthcare facilities. The video embedded below explains the problem in more detail.Click here for full story