This year, BMJ had received 1523 nominations from Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Two years ago, when 39-year-old senior journalist Syed Nazakat took a detour from traditional journalism to create a disruption, he had not anticipated an overwhelming response to his endeavour. Nazakat founded a start-up to better inform those interested in health policies and understanding medical problems, which went on to win laurels at the British Medical Journal awards. The start-up - Health Analytics India won the award for ‘Promoting transparency and integrity in Health Care.’
This year, BMJ had received 1523 nominations from Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Started with no external funding, the web portal has gone on to become self-sustainable now. “As a web portal, we make sense of data sets and documents related to health, released by various states in India as also data that has international significance,” said Nazakat.
Journalists, policy makers and medical experts are primary subscribers to the web portal. “No journalist has time to mull over tens of thousands of pages in documents. We visualise the health data and simplify concepts for them to take the story forward,” Nazakat said. Nazakat was left astonished with the health numbers in India. There were shockingly high number of suicides including deaths due to depression. “Every thing in India is at a very large level. The number of suicides that we encountered were the most though,” he said. “Another shocking instance of data was that close to 80 per cent of deaths in India are not registered.”
Also there is a huge mismatch of resources in the health care sector in India. He pointed out, “We observed that 50 per cent of the doctors in India were coming from six states while the other 50 per cent hailed from the remaining 23 states.
This data should further be probed into. It should become the heart of discussion in health care. Such pieces of data if analysed properly will help make journalists and policymakers, informed decisions,” Nazakat said. “We faced tough competition from Rajasthan Government who were nominated for starting a model of direct payment of benefits to the patients and a reputed Sri Lankan Hospital who had propagated a unique data centre model,” he added.
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