I was traveling to a remote area in India couple of weeks ago. And I visited a govt hospital to see someone I know. As we all know the pathetic condition of govt hospitals in India especially in a remote area.
One of the issues is the availability of doctors and medical equipment.
The employment of doctors is based on the population of an area and finding specialists like cardiologists, nephrologist, pediatrics, etc is next to impossible.
I work as a software engineer and hence I started thinking of a way to improve the situation using technology.
I started thinking about employing some kind of machine learning model to predict the requirement of a specialist doctor for a, particularly remote area whenever there is a need.
Currently, a doctor's posting in a govt hospital is done based on the population in that area rather than any scientific or factual or historical assessment.
Consider following scenario.
1. A location has less population, but due to lower literacy rates, sickness and diseases are rampant. This area would require better/higher appointments of doctors which it will not since the population is limited.
2. Another location has some environmental conditions unsuitable for habitat; something like weather conditions or living conditions are not good and more people are sick continuously.
Machine learning models can assess these situations and predict specific periods and places to post a specific type of specialist doctors for these locations. So rather than having more doctors on the payroll without enough work, the predictions can facilitate a transitional requirement for specialist doctors who can put their skills to better use all year round.
As we all know that All State Govt / Central Govt Hospital have patient data, disease trends, demographic data, etc. for all remote locations in India. Important data points like when a patient came/patients per day/ disease distribution/disease diagnosis/ physician/ physician qualification/ etc are readily stored in files across governmental data centers. If we can gather this data and use it to create machine learning models, we can predict and creates excellent logistics for what needs to be provided - doctors, drugs, precautions and that too when it's most required.
Apart from that, Govt can post this prediction on some web site where may be some private doctors who want to contribute to society can go that location or some NGO may schedule some camp over there for that time.