The 10BedICU Project is an innovative Public Private Partnership project between the Dept of Health and Family Welfare, Govt. of Nagaland, and 10BedICU partner NGOs (eGov Foundation and Karuna Trust) led by eGov Foundation.
Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio, will launch the 10 Bed ICU wards across 12 district hospitals and the Tele ICU Hub at Naga Health Authority, Kohima.
The Project was launched in June 2021 as a response to the devastation caused by the COVID 19-second wave. The intervention has evolved from a relief project into a system-strengthening project. The Project tries to bridge the gaps in critical service delivery in India. India has a highly deficient critical care infrastructure compared to several developed and low- and middle-income countries (Table 1).
Table 1. Estimate of Critical Care Availability in India:
| Critical care resource | Estimate of Availability | Comments |
| Beds | 2.3 beds per 100,000 population | Germany has 29.2 ICU beds, and Canada has ICU beds per 100,000. Among LMICs, Mongolia has 8.8 beds per 100,000, and Nepal has 2.8 beds per 100,000. |
| Beds with capacity to Oxygen supply | 1,20,000 | |
| Ventilators | 15,000-48,000 | Large variation in data depending on the source |
| Total number of doctors | 1:1457 population | |
| ICU doctors | 12,000 | registered with ISCCM |
| Total number of nurses | 1.7:1000 population | WHO recommended norm 3:1000 population |
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(Source: Vijayraghavan et al., 2021) |
The Project aims to address five critical problems in critical care delivery:
Sl. No. |
Problem/gap |
10BedICU Intervention to solve the problem/gap |
1 |
Absence of ICU facility in rural hospitals. |
Support governments to set up 10 Bedded ICU wards at Taluka or District level. |
2 |
Acute shortage of medical specialists in remote hospitals |
Create Tele-ICU Hub and spoke, connecting ICU units in remote locations with State Tertiary hospitals/Medical College. |
3 |
Manual or paper-based Healthcare system, slow to respond to COVID surges. |
A Robust technology platform for patient and hospital management, with features for future pandemic management. |
4 |
Existing medical staff lack skills in critical care. |
Certificate training Modules for staff and standardized ICU protocols |
5 |
Weak integration of healthcare facilities with the local community, creating access and quality deficits. |
A focused Communitisation strategy of strengthening Rogi Kalyan Samiti, a community institutional mechanism in government hospitals. |
An MoU was signed last year on July 21st, ‘2021, between the Dept of Health and Family Welfare, Govt. of Nagaland, and 10BedICU partner NGOs (eGov Foundation and Karuna Trust).
The 10BedICU partner raises funds through donors in India and abroad to provide medical equipment, technology (software & hardware), and capacity building for medical and hospital staff. And the Govt provides the physical infrastructure, human resources and other operational expenses to run the ICU units set up under the project.
To oversee the project, a Project Management Unit with senior bureaucrats, including the Home Commissioner and Health Sect, and members from 10BedNGO partners was constituted.
In Nagaland, the health department also created a sub-committee consisting of senior officials from the Health Department to assist the PMU members and ensure speedy implementation.
HDFC Bank Parivartan funded the 10BedICU ward in Dimapur district hospital, and Vinod Khosla supported the 10BedICU wards in all the other districts. Vinod Khosla also funded the Tele-ICU Hub and spokes. Karuna Trust and Nagaland Gandhi Ashram are the field NGO partners of the project in Nagaland. Hamilton Medical Switzerland also donated one ventilator for every two ventilators procured.
10BedICU is made possible by eGovernments Foundation’s CARE platform, a cloud-based open source patient management tool, as well as a smart capacity management software and patient management software. These form a TeleICU module which runs on Google Cloud’s secure, scalable and reliable infrastructure and can be seamlessly accessed in real-time by medical professionals at the TeleICU hub in Naga Hospital Authority and the connected spoke hospitals.
The 10BedICU is being implemented in 8 states, including Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Manipur, Assam, Nagaland, Sikkim and Meghalaya. 200 ICU units have been set up across the project states. The Tele-ICU Hub and spoke model is showing promising signs of evolving into a transformation healthcare model, especially in resource constraint and remote locations.