StepOne Believes Technology Will Make Large Scale Interventions Possible
Project StepOne was started to provide citizens with a very easy way to reach doctors during the pandemic. The thought was to ensure every Covid affected citizen must get support. Initially, the plan was modest, to serve maybe a few 100 citizens in Bangalore, however since we used technology to make the connection and worked as an extension of the government. Project StepOne is a non-profit startup collective of technology and healthcare professionals on a mission to augment government resources with technology, people and processes to effectively fight against Covid. We work with state and district governments, as an integral part of the government work processes and systems to fight Covid, bringing appropriate telemedicine interventions to un-bottleneck the processes - all services are not charged and pro-bono to the government.
How does it work?
StepOne is similar to Uber, it connects Covid affected citizens with medical professionals. Unlike Uber, Project StepOne is free for Citizens and is enabled by medical professionals volunteering their time on the StepOne technology platform. StepOne works with state and city governments, so citizens mostly call the state-designated helplines or the Government provides lists of Covid positive patients whom StepOne proactively call out.
How many doctors and volunteers are currently actively working with Project StepOne.
StepOne has over 12,000 doctors, however, we also have over 15K medical students/interns and over 5K non-medical volunteers. A volunteer can choose when they want to enable their availability and participate, so not everyone is active everyday. On a given day, depending on the number of cases, we have usually 5-10% of these are active - during peak case load much more are active.
Where do you want to take Project StepOne?
Project StepOne has demonstrated 2 things during Covid that are the use of technology to provide wider healthcare access and the use of medical students and non-medical volunteers to assist doctors in the process
The above two can be extended beyond Covid to other areas of healthcare. StepOne will be a force in supporting Governments and non-governmental initiatives to provide better healthcare access and outcomes via technology and know-how.
How many states are you working in right now? What are your future expansion plans?
Helped Covid Management in the following 21 states listed below:
* States and UTs: Karnataka, Chattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Delhi, Punjab, Puducherry, Bihar, Maharashtra, Odisha, Nagaland, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Manipur, Goa, GOI-AYUSH, Assam, Jammu & Kashmir
* Cities: Pune, East Kameng, Latur, Sangli, Cuddalore, Coimbatore,, Nagpur, Satara, Mumbai, Gurugram, Navi Mumbai, Pimpri Chinchwad, Faridabad, Lakhimpur Khetri
* Others: Bihar AES, Odisha Workers helpline, Covid Rasksha, Blr Zonal helplines, Bangalore 1912 etc
What does 2022 have in store for Project StepOne?
The year 2022 will hopefully be the year when we will shift our focus from mainly Covid to helping governments in strengthening interventions in other areas of public health - particularly non-communicable diseases where we believe technology will make large scale interventions possible.
