Doctors launch portal to spot vacant beds

New York A group of doctors and professionals from the diaspora 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 real-time 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.