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Swasth Digital Health Foundation, along with ACT Grants, a social change movement of the Indian startup ecosystem, is procuring 50,000 Oxygen Concentrators (OC) and other medical supplies to aid the fight against COVID-19. 

The alliance has deployed 3,500 OCs (as of May 1), with an additional 10,000 expected to be deployed by May 8. It also confirmed the supply of a total of 35,000 concentrators, with a majority expected to be delivered by May 15.

These oxygen concentrators will be donated across India free of cost. While Delhivery and Amazon have onboarded as the logistics partners, Temasek Foundation is the sourcing and funding partner. Paytm is also acting as one of the sourcing partners.

Swasth is a not-for-profit alliance of over 150+ healthcare organisations in India, which includes hospitals, rural health NGOs, insurers, healthtech, medtech, and others. It has also partnered with Zomato’s non-profit, Feeding India.

The alliance is providing two types of oxygen concentrators:

• A high-flow concentrator, which can provide oxygen up to 10 litres per minute, and costs Rs 60,000/$800. It can treat up to 550 patients with a severe or critical illness.
• A low-flow concentrator, which can provide oxygen up to 5 litres per minute, and costs Rs 45,000/$600. It can treat up to 900 patients with mild to moderate illness.

However, these prices are indicative and can fluctuate many times a day. At present, India needs over 2,00,000 oxygen concentrators, it said.

Swasth Alliance has also partnered with United Way of Bengaluru (UWB) and Indian Software Product Industry Round Table Foundation (iSPIRT), who are the fund administration partners for the Oxygen Concentrator initiative.

Other initiatives

The alliance is also working to help rural health programmes and community health workers and is creating shareable short-form video content on self-care. It is also working with a range of healthcare behaviour change organisations to build a library of patient education material in all Indian languages. 

Along with Harvard University and rural health organisations like Jan Swasthya Sahyog, Basic Health Services, and SEWA Rural, the alliance is creating common open-source clinical protocols and health worker training material to enable Indian organisations to build and run field hospitals.

It also aims to leverage digital health technologies to drive healthcare inclusion and outcomes with a particular focus on enabling comprehensive, integrated care models.

The alliance’s core board members include Dr Nachiket Mor, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Dr CS Pramesh, Dr Ranjan Pai, Shobana Kamineni, Shashank ND, and Dr Ajay Nair.

The right information

The alliance has partnered with several companies, including Facebook and Google, to deliver information on resources available on Liferesources.  

“There is a need for high-quality, clinically-validated care protocols to prevent patient harm from misinformation. Swasth Alliance has a board of leading medical experts and an in-house medical products council who work with IEC (information, education, communication) expert partners, such as Saathealth and Noora Health, to create and disperse this material,” it added.

It has also deployed a Whatsapp chatbot (+91 80619 33193) for self-care, developed in Hindi and English. It will be adding 10 more languages this week.

“We have built a large crowdsourced library of local resources in multiple Indian languages staffed by over 130+ volunteers, and are adding a crisis response line to deal with patient queries,” it said.

Swasth has gathered demand from multiple sources, including its healthcare network and not-for-profit organisation on-ground, and government sources. All details of demand (presently 280,000+ concentrators) are published on its website at (form, raw data, and dashboard).

“We know that our efforts alone cannot cater to all the demand we have created, we are publishing this data so that other funders who are interested may reach out directly and fund individual facilities. Please write to us at contact@swasthapp.org with details for contact details of any of the facilities we list. Given the paucity of time and resources, we have not conducted due diligence on the requirements, and the information is being presented as we receive it,” the statement read.

The alliance is looking at donor funding from multiple sources, including crowdfunding campaigns, corporate grants, and CSR initiatives. Some of these include Impactguru, Milaap, and Ketto, among others.

For grants above Rs 7,50,000 or $10,000, please write to us at shubha@swasthapp.org.