Today’s Times of India carries a full page article on Indian Hospitals providing telemedicine services to hospitals in Africa.
What crosses my mind is why are we focusing on Africa when we need same services to penetrate into India’s hinterland. There have been isolated centres of excellence of using this innovative technology by some hospitals like Arvind Eye Hospital, which uses this technology at its vision centers in rural areas which are linked to their secondary/tertiary eye care centers for getting those images of eye tests to be read by qualified ophtalmologists.
Similarly, Narayan Hrudayala Hospital has been using telemedicine in their Cardiac Hospital both at Bangalore and Kolkata. Such services should be replicated by other hospitals as well and government should facilitate this through free or subsidized telecommunication links. ISRO has been doing this for some select hospitals.
One important department that can benefit from such technology is Radiology, wherein, trained Radiologists can report centrally whilst equipments can be at multiple locations. A good Radiology Information System along with PACS Software could facilitate this easily. One can imagine that medical college institutions should be the focal point for having the pool of qualified Radiologists, reporting CT Scans, MRIs, X-Rays, etc. from remote district hospitals, which otherwise find it difficult to obtain services of a qualified and experienced Radiologist in these smaller towns. India’s telecommunication network is surely developing fast and the healthcare community as well as both State & Central Government should think seriously of imbibing such innovations.
Have a Great Day !!!
How much percentage of Physician population would actually be interested for telemedicine ? The government initiatives to establish telemedicine has been proliferative since last few years, and many government medical colleges are connected be technology of video-conferencing , but how the efforts are accounted for ?
I was working with Bharti group (Airtel) and during 1996,I tried to motivate the Mittal brothers to look at this area since they were a mojor player in Telecom and were present in healthcare as well.Mr Chtawal,who is at Reliance Healthcare cmae and made a presentation to us during 1996–but nothing happened.
my second exposure to telemedicine was during 2005 at Max Healthcare,when one of our colleagues,Dr Pavitro paul–did a lot of work and we set up the centre–and travelled to eastern region and srinagar for connecting the facilities with our hospital–but he,himself left Max and I ahve no idea what happened to Telemedicine after his leaving–
It is a great technology and can be a boon for rural areas and small towns who do not have experienced Radilogists.Cardiologists or Surgeons-
Whre is the Bottle neck??I find both Govt and Private sector lagging behind–or may be I am not aware and somebody has to give me the latest work being done by some hospitals like Dr Debi Shetty and Arvind Eye Hospital—