IT‐enabled innovation to prevent infant blindness in rural India: the KIDROP experience

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to share the IT‐based experience of the first tele‐ophthalmology initiative in infant blindness prevention set up to serve rural India.Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes the two‐plus years of experience of the “Karnataka Internet Assisted Diagnosis of Retinopathy of Prematurity (KIDROP) initiative” pioneered by one of the leading private tertiary eye care providers in India, Narayana Nethralaya Postgraduate Institute of Ophthalmology, Bangalore. KIDROP was the first tele‐ophthalmology initiative in the world to use trained non‐physicians (“trained technicians”) to capture images of the retinas of infants a few weeks old for a potentially blinding condition called retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) and validated them to store, process and analyze those images at the rural centre itself. In addition, these images were uploaded to a specially customized software‐hardware platform that allowed remotely situated experts to view these images and report real ti...