Technology-enabled solution and rural empowerment

In India, out of  the 121 crore Indians, 83.3 crores live in rural areas while 37.7 crore stays in urban areas as per the Census of India’s 2011 Provisional Rural-Urban Population Distribution, released by Union Home Secretary.

Rural people even if some are educated they are unskilled and do not possess enough knowledge about health care services and early diagnostics methods. They often resort  to home-based remedies for pain management do not visit any diagnostic centers due to the lack of a) awareness, b) access to diagnostics centers and c) equipment for screening and testing in primary healthcare centers. Therefore, people from rural India, who are often considered as the lifeline of our nation, have to travel far to get access to quality health care.

We at Sascan feel that such disparities need to be addressed.  As a startup, we have a social obligation towards our rural populace to make them aware of the importance of early detection of cancer by setting up medical camps with involvement from local administration and self-help groups (SHG).  Perhaps creating awareness among the women population about cervical, oral and breast cancers and the high mortality rates associated with these cancers can to a great extent help them in resorting to early detection methods for various types of cancers that have high prevalence among the rural population. They should be made to understand that by periodic screening, these diseases can be detected early and lives can be saved and cost of treatment minimized. In this context, the state of art device designed and developed by Sascan Meditech has a role to play by becoming a  change-maker in society.  Clinical studies have shown that “OralScan" device can detect early tissue transformations at the cellular level and pave the way for improved patient care.

The idea of proper health care in terms of making available accurate, affordable, and reliable digital screening devices should be the priority of the primary healthcare providers.  Sascan, as a responsible organization, is continuously striving towards developing state of art technologies that can address these challenges and gaps in our healthcare system. We believe that by developing effective strategies not only to screen and detect cancer early, but also to provide real-time feed back to the user at the point of care and also helping the clinician to locate the most malignant site for biopsy would pave the way for an accurate diagnosis and staging of cancer, saving lives and minimizing the personal, societal, and economic costs of cancer care.