An open source application to combat infant mortality rates in India

PUNE, INDIA: Neonatal care is a critical domain in the healthcare segment given the high mortality rate(41%) amongst children aged 5 or below globally. India accounts for 28% of all neonatal deaths caused globally, a number which has gone up to 52% in the last decade.

Lack of nutrition being one of the primary reasons for neonatal mortality, getting the right mix of nutrition to support life is a critical aspect in ensuring survival of premature babies. Currently, the process is manual and involves a lot of mathematical calculations using the Hyperalimentation Worksheet. This is time consuming (more than 45 minutes) and quite often, prone to human error.

Josh Software and the medical team at Pune-based King Edward’s Memorial Hospital have developed a cloud based application to tackle the life critical challenges in formulating the right nutritional mix for premature infants in Neonatal ICUs. Leveraging their extensive Ruby On Rails expertise, Josh Software has delivered a fully automated, cloud based, mobile application which helps neonatologists calculate the composition and concentration of additives and dextrose required by neonates.

The application assists in quick administration of this nutritional formula at an acceptable infusion rate with the correct CNR (Calorie Nitrogen Ratio) to avoid complications and fatality. The application has been designed to provide 100% accuracy in calculating the composition and concentration of additives and dextrose required by an infant. The entire calculation is done within seconds, saving the doctor’s time and preventing errors.

The one screen application which can be used on tablet, smartphones and laptops allows doctors to calculate the neonatal nutri-plan for each baby with very high accuracy within seconds. This simply requires them to enter a set of informational data points into the application, such as body weight, additives amount, Lipid requirement and other special nutritional options. This cloud based application allows the records of infants to be accessed easily in the future and from multiple locations.

Dr. Umesh Vaidya, M.D., D.N.B. Pediatric, KEM Hospital Pune said, "Nutritional requirements of premature babies have to be calculated very accurately to avoid complications and help the baby grow. Kimaya application is very doctor friendly and has resulted in a huge increase in calculation speed and accuracy from the existing manual calculations. "

Gautam Rege, Co-founder and MD, Josh Software and key member of the KimayaNICU team said, “Being one of the most delicate branches of medicine neonatology requires utter care and accuracy when it comes to the treatment and caring of the neonates and Josh team is very happy to work with KEM hospital Pune and develop a cutting edge solution with immense precision based on RoR framework. Kimaya TPN application is a revolutionary product which is definitely going to change the whole ball game for NICUs in India as well as globally.”

The pilot version of the software was used in a few hospitals across India, including KEM Hospital. The impact the application can have is huge and a further refined version of the software, based on inputs by medical experts is ready to give NICUs across the country a cutting edge tool aimed at saving infant lives.