Almost 75 per cent of COVID-19 affected patients can be taken care of at home and need no hospitalisation until their SPO2 levels drop down to an alarming number. According to numerous studies and experts these patients can be kept under home isolation, advised proper medication and do not need to worry about their recovery. To make home isolation easier for people across the country, a platform called yanaindia.org was set up last week that brings together doctors from around the world to provide free tele guidance to patients online. The platform is a citizen's initiative, set up and run by volunteers, social workers, technologists from cities like Coimbatore, Bangalore, Chennai, and even from places abroad such as Bangladesh, the US and more.
The platform was first thought of by Dr Ahila Ayyavoo, who is from Coimbatore. She got her batchmates and juniors, who are also doctors, on board for this initiative. Kannan Venkatasubramanian, who is her schoolmate, was approached to plan and set up this initiative, is now one of the main volunteers from Coimbatore. "Dr Ahila called up and said she wished to do something along with some of her colleagues in the US to help people in India. She spoke about how hospitals are already overwhelmed with the inflow of serious COVID patients and are finding it difficult to deal with consultations of patients with mild symptoms or the ones who don't necessarily need to be admitted. She wanted to mobilise a team of doctors to help with this and we came up with this platform as the solution. We mainly focus on teleconsultation of patients who are in home quarantine and need a doctor's guidance from time to time," explains Kannan.
How does the it work? A patient who is in home quarantine and needs guidance can go to yanaindia.org and register by clicking the Patients’ Request form. Then they have to fill in all the mandatory columns and patients can even upload the test results if they’ve already done an RT-PCR. One can upload the picture of the reports on the website and it has to be within 50KB. Once this is completed, the patient will receive a confirmation message for their teleconsultation with a specific date and time. A volunteer will be there at all times to help the patient through the entire process.
There are a total of 28 doctors on the platform now and they regularly conduct sessions online on Zoom throughout the day. "These doctors have studied in India, are classmates but work abroad. They discussed and decided to work out a plan to make YanaIndia work. We have been receiving around 25-20 patients each day already," he adds.
