Public Health in India

Despite rapid advances in modern medicine and state-of-the-art health care services in the private sector, primary health care in India remains inaccessible to a majority of the population. Besides, even policymakers often do not have access to real-time data to fine-tune their policies or design appropriate research and intervention programmes. Drawing on field experiences, this volume brings together scholars and practitioners to examine public health from different perspectives. It discusses practical and applied issues related to the health sector, especially the role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT); participation of civil society; service delivery; quality evaluation; consumer empowerment; data management; and research and intervention. This book will be useful to scholars, students and practitioners of public health in developing countries such as India. It will also interest policymakers, health care professionals, and departments of public health management and those concerned with community medicine.

Diatha Krishna Sundar is Professor of Operations Management; Chairperson of Production & Operations Management Area; and Chairperson - ERP Center, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB). Shashank Garg is Chief Executive Officer of Handheld Solutions & Research Labs (HANDSREL), Bangalore. Isha Garg is a Medical Doctor and was Professor of Pathology, and a former head, at St. John's Medical College, Bangalore.

Abbreviations. Introduction. 1. Save the Baby Girl Girish Lad and Laxmikant Deshmukh 2. Communication Trends amongst Hospital Personnel: A Multi-Site Methodology Candice D. Presseau, Qian Gao, Osman R. Sayan, and Stan Kachnowski 3. Measuring Service Quality in Health Sectors using SERVQUAL Model Chhanda Ray and Manigrib Bag 4. Challenges to E-Governance Projects in Public Healthcare in India Aritra Pal, Arunabha Biswas and J. Ajith Kumar 5. The Role of NGOs in Creating Participatory Dialogic Praxis for Community-based Mental Health Care: Reflections from Field Experiences at NAMI India Maheswar Satpathy 6. R: An Open Source Alternative for Statistical Research in Public Health Raghu K. Mittal 7. mHealth4U®: Convergence of ICT and Mobile Technologies for Rural Healthcare Delivery Repu Daman Chand, Indra Pratap Singh and Saroj Kanta Mishra 8. Using Self Service Technology: Facilitating Customer Empowerment in a Telemedicine Context R. Lakshmi and P. Ganesan 9. A Framework for Mobile-based Electronic Data Collection in Clinical Trials Peter Wakholi, Weiqin Chen and Jørn Klungsøyr 10. A Mobile Electronic Data Capture Solution for Applications in Public Health Shashank Garg, Isha Garg and Diatha Krishna Sundar. Bibliography. About the Editors. Notes on Contributors. Index