L J Ravi 
Bangalore, 7 October 2021: MillionICU, an initiative by Dozee that addresses the massive shortage of ICU beds and staff in public hospitals has upgraded 50 ward beds into step-down ICUs at Jayanagar General Hospital to facilitate critical care for thousands of patients. Dozee has also set up a 24×7 Central Monitoring Cell at the hospital which enables healthcare staff to monitor multiple patients remotely who were previously monitored manually only every couple of hours. Launched with the goal of bringing a rapid, long-term transformation in India’s public healthcare infrastructure, the MillionICU initiative will help public hospitals upgrade critical care infrastructure across the country.
The MillionICU initiative has also benefited other government hospitals in the state which include Garden City hospital, Charaka Hospital, Victoria Hospital, Anekal Government Hospital, ESIC in Bengaluru and Shimoga Institute of Medical Sciences who have upgraded their hospital beds into step-down ICUs in the last few months. Collectively at these hospitals, 584 step-down ICU beds have already been installed to create smart wards. This initiative will ensure ICU-level care to more than 4796 patients and help doctors & nurses save precious time to care for many more.
The MillionICU initiative is an effort to leapfrog the critical health infrastructure and empower government hospitals with step-down ICU beds. The initiative aims to dramatically increase the number of HDUs with centralized patient monitoring in these hospitals and make critical care more easily accessible and available even in the remotest parts of the country. Under the initiative, hospital beds will be installed with Dozee’s contactless sensors featuring an AI-powered triaging system This enables continuous (more than 100 times per hour) and accurate monitoring of a patient’s heart rate, respiratory rate, and other clinical parameters like sleep apnea and myocardial performance metrics without coming in contact with the patient. The constant stream of patient data aids the medical staff with early detection of patient deterioration and notifies the care team of any abnormalities before it becomes critical. Custom alerts can be set for every patient, helping doctors optimise treatment plans, focus on deteriorating patients and provide improved proactive care.
India has around 9.26 lakh doctors and less than 20,000 of these are trained in pulmonology, anaesthesiology, critical care and emergency medicine. According to experts and doctors, India will need an extra 500,000 ICU beds, 200,000 nurses and 150,000 doctors in the next one year. Emergency medical and critical care systems in India are suffering from lack of essential resources, overload and severe working conditions. Dozee’s MillionICU initiative is a bold step towards changing the critical care infrastructure throughout the country. It offers a unique opportunity for government hospitals to use technology to quickly augment the current critical care capacity in India. India’s public expenditure on health as a percentage of GDP is a little over 1%, one of the lowest in the world. Lack of medical funds and healthcare infrastructure continue to pose challenges in scaling an effective response against the current crisis. The MillionICU initiative answers this urgent need of strengthening the long term health infrastructure and making quality healthcare available, accessible and affordable to the vast majority of the population.
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Supporting Quotes
Dr Ramakrishnappa, Medical Superintendent
“MillionICU initiative is a key contributor in helping doctors and nurses to be better prepared for any increase in critical care requirements. Technologies such as Remote Patient Monitoring and AI can help doctors and nurses continuously monitor critical patients and save valuable hours by prioritising patients based on their needs. Dozee will help provide much needed support to government hospitals in the state by converting ward beds into step-down ICUs, thereby enabling better patient outcomes”
Mudit Dandwate, CEO & Cofounder, Dozee
“We are excited to work hand in hand with Jayanagar General Hospital to upgrade their beds into step-down ICUs enabled by the MillionICU initiative. With this technology, we aim at upgrading the public healthcare infrastructure thereby enabling improved patient outcomes while significantly reducing the load on nurses and doctors. We aspire to install more than 50,000 step-down ICU beds across India in the next 6 months to improve India’s critical care capacity significantly.”
