Care N Grow to launch cloud-based health service for students

Hyderabad: 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 Lifestyle 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.

Care N Grow is a division of Synvergent HealthConnect Private Limited.