During product development we also consulted the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and ASHAs who are community health workers to ensure the information on the cards is useful and accessible. These can also be downloaded as PDF immediately and can be shared with anyone.
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Next time you will search about a health condition on Google, along with usual results you will see a panel, which Google calls “card”.
The cards, which were introduced in the USA a year ago, will tell you everything you need to know about a disease in layman terms- its prevalence, symptoms, diagnosis, the way it spreads and the age group it affects. This will work with Google Search on the desktop and also on the Android and iOS apps.
Prem Ramaswami, Senior Product Manager at Google said, “Around the world, health conditions are among the most important things that people ask Google about”. India, a country that has long experienced a sharp socioeconomic and cultural divide, is one of these paradoxes; the country that was building wifi infrastructure to meet the rising demand of ebooks and digital textbooks in its classrooms still suffers from lack of basic healthcare access for many of its citizens. Sangita Reddy, Joint Managing Director, Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Ltd said: “Our aim is to empower people with accurate, appropriate and easy to understand information so as to support them and provide a framework from which they can have a better conversation with their doctor”. “Of course, we want to expand to other regional languages as well”, add Ramaswami, explaining why only Hindi is now available as a local language option. Google has been using cards for weather, cricket, movies and celebrities. “No way are we saying patients should ignore a doctor in case of a medical condition”, says Ramaswami. Google also shows instant answers. The health card aims to help consumers and people’s access and appreciate information quickly and easily.
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With hundreds of millions of Indians not online or new to the Internet, Google is still seen by many as a specialist research tool rather than a daily information source. The company said that it had partnered with several doctors, Mayo Clinic and Apollo Hospitals to authenticate the information available in the cards.
