Jaroka is a Tele-Medicine initiative that is the brainchild of Atif Mumtaz of Personforce / Brightspyre. The project has been running as a pilot in Skardu and Mardan for two years, and have received a number of awards and recognition in the past.

They just announced that they have received funding from the USAID and HEC to expand beyond the pilot into a full-out 2-year implementation in Mardan. My sources tell me that its in the range of US$300,000.

Here’s a description of what they have been doing, from when Atif was a runner-up for the DHL YES! (Young Social Entrepreneur) award.

The premise of their project is to connect rural healthcare centers with doctors in major cities or internationally for advise and remote consultation via the internet.

With partnership from stakeholders such as APPNA, COMSATs and Digital Vision Program, and even Stanford University, the project has conducted a pilot project of the system in Skardu. COMSATS provided them a dedicated satellite connection in Skardu and medical professionals for the test. Atif’s team provided the open-source telemedicine system.

The system itself used a stored-and-forward approach to telemedicine to coordinate and get feedback from specialists in the US.

Their results show that 2000 patients visited the center in the first two-year pilot period, where 77% of the cases were specialist dermatological cases for which specialist doctors had not been available in Skardu at that time.

I think these people are doing a great cause and showing the social benefits of leveraging IT technology for advancing the human spirit and cause. For more about their project (their research results about the systems are pretty interesting) read here.