District Health Call Center - Khammam, AP, India

How we used an off-the-shelf EPABX and innovative software to create a highly cost-effective Call Center system

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  Breaking News
This project has won the Bronze Icon award at the 9th National e-Governance Conference held at Kochi in Kerala from February 2 to 4 under the Joint auspices of the Department of Administrative reforms, Government of India and the Department of Information Technology, Government of Kerala.
(News article in The Hindu)

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The District of Khammam in Andhra Pradesh, India, has quietly started a revolution in the area of e-governance by making innovative use of technology to directly and proactively help people in medical emergencies.

On 9 th March 2005, the Governor of Andhra Pradesh Shri Sushil Kumar Shinde, officially inaugurated the Khammam District Health Call Centre, a 24-hour hotline for resolving medical emergencies and for providing a single point of contact for mobilizing the considerable medical facilities and ambulances that the district government possesses.

The project is the brainchild of Khammam District Collector Shri Rajendra Narendra Nimje, IAS. According to Shri Nimje, the system will help to ensure timely availability of ambulances, medical facilities and doctors even in the remotest areas of the district.

The highlight of the Call Centre is an intelligent software system that helps capture complete details of each call, such as incident location, time and caller identity based on the incoming phone number, and automatically suggests the nearest available medical facility, ambulances, and doctors.

Contact details for all available resources are popped up on the screen and the call center operator can quickly manage the entire logistics of any operation including mobilizing the ambulance, notifying the hospital or public health centre (PHC), and informing the doctors.

According to Shri Nimje, the system will be highly effective due to the fact that the software includes comprehensive reporting that can help senior administration officials to keep track of the quality of response provided on each call.

VolkSoft Technologies Private Limited, a Secunderabad based, developed the software component of the solution, and Pioneer Telecom Services, Hyderabad, provided the communications hardware.

According to Mr. Alan Pappachan, CEO & Managing Director, VolkSoft Technologies, the challenge was to deliver the complete working system in a very short time-span. VolkSoft Technologies was able to deliver the system in less than 15 days.

Elaborating on the implementation details, Mr. Pappachan said that the system was developed on C# .NET and Borland Delphi, with SQL Server as the backend. “When an incoming call is detected, the server immediately records the caller information, including the exchange area, and if available the address of the caller’s phone. Each telephone extension at the call centre is mapped to a computer terminal, and when the call lands on an extension, the software automatically pops up the browser on the terminal mapped to that extension, and shows the available information, allowing the operator to quickly fill in conversation details.”

“The core of the system is our multi-level search methodology, which uses keywords found in the conversation to identify the nearest facilities, doctors and ambulances. The next level of search looks for specializations or facilities that might be required to deal with the specific case on hand. For example, in the case of an accident, blood banks will also show up in the search result.”

“Operators can then call up the resources and dispatch them very quickly. Exception reporting is made possible because details of all outgoing calls are also recorded in the database. Backend reports help the district administration to pin responsibilities and to ensure a high quality of response.”