Visualising care in rural healthcare

Data in rural healthcare moves in one direction. It is collected on the ground, travels upward for analysis, and returns, if it returns at all, as lengthy reports, templated dashboards, and messy Excel files that serve bureaucratic accountability rather than local decision-making.

Abhiram's work starts from a different question: what would visualization look like if it was designed as care infrastructure, built alongside the people who actually use it?

This talk presents the Decision Support System developed with a Community Palliative Care initiative across seven Gram Panchayats in Kundapura, Karnataka. Co-designed with frontline workers, mobile care teams, volunteer doctors, and Gram Panchayat officers, the DSS is decentralized, offline-first, and built around three core artefacts.

Phygital care profiles give care teams and volunteer doctors a way to design and monitor individualised care plans across medical, emotional, and psychosocial domains. Visualizations include family trees to map caregiving patterns, hand-drawn route maps where geospatial data does not exist, and pain assessment scales built on the visual language of the care teams themselves.

Care seeker booklets are physical books given directly to each patient: no-tech interfaces for tracking conditions, monitoring daily care, logging visits, and carrying tear-off referral slips to hospitals and PHCs.

A data atlas gives Gram Panchayats, PHCs, and the taskforce a customisable spatial view of community-level insights, supporting everything from medical consultations to scheme allotment to infrastructure decisions.

The talk surfaces what it actually takes to build visualisation systems for contexts with varying literacy, low connectivity, and multilingual needs, and what it means to prioritise people and decisions over features and numbers.