A group of doctors and professionals from the Expatriate in the US and from India has launched a first-of-its-kind online map that shows available hospital beds in India with real-time updates, aimed at providing critical and time-sensitive information to anxious Covid-19 patients, as the country battles a devastating second wave of the pandemic.

'MadadMaps.com' by Project Madad (help) is India's first country-wide map of available hospital beds with realtime updates, said Washington-based Dr Rajesh Anumolu, lead architect of 'MadadMaps'. The portal uses a proprietary algorithm to extract information from all major online aggregators of hospital beds availability in every Indian city and state for both the government and private hospitals, he said.

It cross-verifies and filters this information across sites, prioritises official data and eliminates all data that has not been updated for long, he said. Project Madad, a unique initiative by the voluntary team of 15 Indian and Indian diaspora doctors/COVID-19 experts and 12 professionals, has been created with the mission that "proper education and training" of local healthcare workers and Registered Medical Practitioners (RMPs) will be "fundamental" in controlling the COVID-19 spread in rural India. "Indian families combating COVID-19 are struggling to access proper care such as oxygen supply, ventilators or access to an ICU bed for their loved ones.

 "Across the country, to find a hospital bed, our citizens are forced to call each hospital, manually find hospitals online, or place desperate appeals on social media," a statement from Project Madad said.

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