When MillenniumIT ESP (MIT ESP), along with the MJF Charitable Foundation (MJFCF), repurposed and adopted the HealthVision tele-medicine platform last year, they created a global benchmark in supporting children with special needs as well as their families. Almost a year later, the project has culminated in MIT ESP becoming a ‘Finalist – Microsoft Partner of the Year’ under the Inclusion Changemaker Category for its contribution toward this timely requirement of teletherapy services for children with Cerebral Palsy. This is only the beginning of what’s in store.
In October 2020, MJFCF and MIT ESP launched disABILITY – an app designed to support children with disability and their families by connecting them to expert guidance. The launch coincided with the World Cerebral Palsy Day and the application was aimed at complementing the MJF Foundation’s disability advice channel on YouTube in reaching children and people with disabilities in remote parts of Sri Lanka. The disABILITY app powered by HealthVision has been extremely successful and received well.
Children with special needs and their caretakers are now able to directly communicate with the MJFCF Team via audio, video and chat facility through a tri-lingual service. Moreover, the platform’s remote monitoring and response ability ensures patients’ health status can be brought to attention early enough so proactive intervention and individual care can be provided as and when required.
What’s significant about the award?
Microsoft’s Inclusion Changemaker Partner of the Year Award recognizes partner organizations that go over and beyond in offering innovative and unique solutions or services based on Microsoft technologies. These solutions are often those that aim to help customers solve common challenges related to diversity, economic access, digital inclusion, and accessibility.
The purpose of inclusion changemakers is to drive digital transformation toward a more inclusive and equitable world. This year, around 100 countries submitted over 4,400 projects.
What’s special about the tele-medicine platform?
- Aims to increase greater awareness about Cerebral Palsy (estimated at around 40,000 people in Sri Lanka and 17 million around the world).
- Fosters greater communication to address stigma around those with disabilities and encourage acceptance, respect and inclusion.
- Promotes knowledge sharing and therapy, especially for children in Sri Lanka, around regions where access to such services is limited.
- Ensures continuous care during crisis times, such as the lockdown due to the pandemic, where physical presence is deemed risky.
- Insights into progress of care provided by using techniques that combine learnings with regular therapy.
Functionality and capabilities
MIT ESP adapted its Remote Patient Management platform, HealthVision, to assess, diagnose and continue online therapy for children with Cerebral Palsy and other special needs.
The uniqueness of this platform is its end-to-end capabilities, encompassing disability screening, pediatric diagnosis, early identification and intervention, multi-disciplinary team support, and therapeutic, educational and rehabilitation services. The platform also provides mobility aid support, child progress monitoring and follow up, as well as live video teletherapy. All these capabilities are seamlessly integrated with flexibility and agility at the core to easily adapt to specific use cases. The use of data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) further adds value by providing analytical capabilities for faster and accurate decision making.
Platform features
- Remote teletherapy and video conferencing – Realtime video teletherapy services connect patients (children) and their caretakers with the MJF Centers anytime, anywhere. This facility also allows for patients who live in remote parts of the island to easily connect with healthcare service providers via this platform.
- Customizable assessment workflows – The MJF Foundation can customize and enable new assessment workflows to capture valuable information from patients and then assign them to their physiotherapist teams.
- Multilingual capability – The application is supported by Sinhala, Tamil and English languages, catering to all three languages spoken in the country.
- Data analytics and Machine Learning (ML) – The data gathered by the platform is used to create real time insights via dashboards. In addition, physiotherapists’ comments and reviews are taken into consideration in developing a ML model to help identify disabilities during the early stages and proactively provide care.
- Omnichannel access – The application is developed to support mobile and web responsive access. It can be used via both Android and iOS supported devices.
HealthVision is designed as an asynchronous, near real-time platform to solve the challenge of meeting the ever-growing demand for healthcare with the limited capacity of healthcare providers. State-of-the-art technologies such as analytics and AI, coupled with automation will help further reduce the overall cost per engagement, making access to quality healthcare viable for everyone.
The use of HealthVision ensures the reduction of healthcare risks where deterioration in a patient’s health status can be brought to a provider’s attention early enough, enabling proactive intervention and personalized care, and assisting their caregivers, teachers and trainers who work with special needs individuals.
