BENGALURU: When Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the national tele mental health programme, it brought two institutions in Bengaluru into focus — the International Institute of Information Technology, Bengaluru (IIIT-B) and National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (Nimhans).
For the team at IIIT-B, the news was a surprise.
TK Srikanth, co-convenor, E-Health Research Centre at IIITB, has been leading the team heralding the technological aspect of the programme. His team will now take Karnataka’s e-Manas project to the national level.
“Officially launched in June 2020, the e-Manas project is aimed at integrating all the data of a patient who approaches various clinics or hospitals,” Srikanth said. “This will help seamless integration of services.
So, if a patient goes to a hospital, his/her previous records on mental health can be accessed by staff, with the consent of the patient. This is similar to the system in Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission and we will be involved in integrating it from the standpoint of mental health. ”
With Nimhans launching 23 nodal offices for tele-counselling, the data from tele-counselling will also be integrated into the platform. The IIIT-B team is responsible for designing and developing the platform which will also help hospitals better comply with the Mental Health Act.
“We had designed the platform for the state, but also kept in mind that we should be able to scale it up for other states if the need arose,” Srikanth said. “So, scaling up is unlikely to prove a big challenge. But we need to work with Nimhans and the Centre on various issues like deployment decisions. ”
Divya Raj, head of the programme, e-Health Research Centre, said immense effort has gone into the project as it was a first of its kind solution for mental health. Having worked in the corporate world for over two decades, Raj had moved to IIIT-B to be part of public and social initiatives.
“Issues like data privacy are extremely crucial,” Raj said. “It is heartening that the government is taking it national. It shows the government’s resolve in mental health which is extremely important for a developing country like India. ”
The idea for e-Manas came four years ago from Ajay Seth, the current economic affairs secretary. “He suggested the idea of a platform to integrate all mental health services,” said Srikanth. A PhD in computer science from Cornell University in 1986, and a BTech in mechanical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Srikanth has been with IIIT-B for over eight years now.
“We had made proposals to scale it up, but we weren't expecting it to be announced in the budget. That came as a surprise,” he said.
