JAIPUR: The Pink City-headquartered Khushi Baby, a nonprofit startup that provides digital solutions to strengthen the rural public health system, bagged a joint third position at the Trinity Challenge winning a prize money of $660,000 (Rs 4.9 crore) on Friday in the UK.
The Trinity Challenge was launched by England’s former chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies, who is also master at Trinity College Cambridge, for developing solutions, using Big Data and analytics, to help prevent future pandemics.
Out of the 349 applications from 61 countries the jury of the Trinity Challenge, launched in September 2020, selected eight winners (one grand, two second prizes, and five third prize winners).
Ruchit Nagar, CEO and founder of Khushi Baby said their Khushi Health platform was developed to empower community health workers with offline mobile health tools to screen, refer, and follow up with Covid symptoms, comorbidity, vaccine schedules, and adverse events and also help health officials with GIS-dashboards and automated communication systems to deliver targeted, scalable responses.
“Since launch on July 10, 2020, over 63,000 health workers, including ASHAs, ANMs and MOICs, have registered on the platform.
Our mobile platform has been used to conduct more than 14 million screenings, 94,000 referrals and 31,000 follow ups across both rural and urban settings.
We have identified over 59 lakh vulnerable people including pregnant women, senior citizens and children below 10 years besides 13 lakh high risk cases for Covid.” Khushi Baby began as a classroom project at Yale University by Ruchit Nagar in 2014 and after six years of grassroots involvement, it now has a 35-member team serving as the nodal technical support partner to the department of health in Rajasthan with interventions in digital census, reproductive and child health.
“Over the next one year, our goal is to implement an expanded version of our Covid active surveillance platform, which will include a complete authenticated digital health census, and longitudinal follow-up across health verticals in Rajasthan.
The solution will provide local and state governments with individual and community level Covid and non-Covid health profiles, vaccination statuses and adverse health outcomes,” said Mohammed Shahnawaz, COO and co-founder of Khushi Baby.
The non-profit has also been selected by the Centre to strengthen the CoWIN.
“Through this effort, we plan to scale some of our unique features to improve data quality and datadriven action across India,” added Shahnawaz.
The total prize money of 5.7 million pound ($8 million) was funded by the founding members who include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help the winners deliver their solutions.
The first prize was won by a project in Thailand which gets 1.3 million pound.
The project empowers farmers to identify and report zoonotic diseases that could potentially pass from animals to humans.