Care N Grow To Launch Cloud-Based Health Service for Students

Hon’ble Minister Shri. KTR unveiled the logo of Care N Grow

Two-way App service billed as a ‘school-based health ecosystem’

Care N Grow, a start-up incubated in famed T-Hub, in Hyderabad has announced that a subscription-based preventive health and behaviour change service would be launched for children in schools. Hon’ble IT Minister Shri K. T. Rama Rao unveiled the logo on Friday. He tweeted “Make Prevention mainstream from an early age. A @THubHyd venture #CareNGrow brings health to school children. A digital innovation in public health.” The formal launch event is set for 22^nd November, 2017 at THub.

Founded by award-winning medical graduate Dr. Meghana Kambham: Care N Grow seeks to thwart the issues facing millions of health-compromised children across India by identifying latent and dormant illnesses that affect their learning ability, intervening in the short and long term to minimise their effects, and improve their lives through long-term behavioural change, the only option available to tackle Life-style Diseases, the most dreaded epidemic of today and the future generations to come. The answer to this is Technology, Care N Grow with its patented process is ready to take up this task head-on to the last mile to impact millions of children, enabling them to be healthy and achieve their full academic potential.

With 38% of India’s 315 million students affected by preventable health conditions (which account for 80% of all illnesses) that continue to hold them back, and only 1 paediatrician per 3000 children, Care N Grow has determined that if something is not done immediately to mitigate the situation, this vicious cycle will be set to continue.

Among the preventable problems facing children in schools are drug addiction, obesity, anaemia, simple refractive errors, dysgraphia, dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), musculoskeletal pain, and other such conditions. Stress, illnesses, diseases, and other factors are leading to a generation of children who are too tense to be able to concentrate on their studies.

Care N Grow is also providing the solution. Their project coordinators work with participating schools to set up screening and intervention programs. Using tablets, they assist teachers in collecting data on each student enrolled in Care N Grow, across 40 health and wellness parameters. The devices used are geo-fenced and biometric, meaning they can only be used by the project coordinator on school premises; this guarantees security and privacy.

A parent App enables guardians and families to keep track of children’s individual health report cards, which can only be accessed by that student’s parents to ensure confidentiality associated with a traditional doctor’s office. The App enables parents to see any conditions that may require treatment, as well as suggestions on what interventions may be needed in the short and long term, plus targets and goals that guide long-term behavioural change.

Care N Grow’s disruptive healthcare App is backed by research and psychological theories, such as the Nudge Theory which “proposes positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions to try to achieve non-forced compliance to influence the motives, incentives and decision making of groups and individuals”. By doing this, they are addressing and solving real problems that affect the present as well as the future.

Guided by the belief that prevention is not just pills and vaccine, but a complex set of activities done and learned at the right time, Care N Grow is changing lifestyle diseases from silent killers to would-be threats. Their way forward is driven by a clear objective and purpose: to bring awareness of prevention to the mainstream through the digital space, backed by the #SchoolingHealth hashtag.

about Dr Meghana Kambham, Founder, CareNgrow

A graduate of Andhra Medical College in Visakhapatnam, Dr. Meghana Kambham is an alumna of INSEAD, France as well as Stanford Business School. As a social impact entrepreneur, her mission is to influence and impact intellectually, morally, economically, and socially to bring positive transformation and change for needy sections of society, to women, to children, and to marginalised groups.

“Even while I was studying medicine, I observed several patients with health conditions in the outpatient department who used to make a beeline for medical services, 90% of whom were women and children, almost all of them from underprivileged or weaker sections of society, spending time and money on treatment for illnesses or diseases that could have easily been averted or prevented. Care N Grow is a logical step for me in fulfilling my deeply-felt obligation to make an upstream health impact to larger and needy sections of the society, and for the good humanity and the nation in a deep sustainable way.”

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