The Biggest Revolution: Telemedicine Services in India
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Back in history, who would have thought of having mobile phones, wirelessly working earphones, mobile charging devices. From then to today, with the fast-paced evolution in technology, telemedicine has come a long way in terms of healthcare delivery.
Telemedicine services have innovated to make healthcare easily accessible to the remotely located population.
”Telemedicine is the natural evolution of healthcare in the digital world”
The concept of telemedicine came into existence to communicate medical data over a distance. Establishment of highly facilitated hospitals powered with advanced technologies has been prominent since forever, but the same is not observed in the rural areas. But, the agile medical services are of utmost importance to save the lives of rural people as well. Responding to this need, telecommunication encompasses health care delivery in addition to other activities such as education, research, health surveillance, and public health promotion in the remote areas of the nation.
Why are Telemedicine services crucial in India?
India has a sundry population of more than 125 crores. This makes it a little difficult to to distribute equitable healthcare services at the right time. Also, as per the trend, the healthcare facilities are concentrated mostly in the urban areas (more than 75% of the doctors), more than the rural areas (where 60 % of the national population resides). This led to the establishment of the National Telemedicine Task Force by the Health Ministry India in 2005.
What are the examples of telemedicine projects in India?
One of the great examples of the successfully established telemedicine services in India include mammography services at Sri Ganga Ram Hospital, Delhi, oncology at Regional cancer center, Trivandrum, surgical services at Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences, School of Telemedicine and Biomedical Informatics, and many more. Telemedicine also finds its use in places of large social gathering, like at Maha Kumbhmela in UP.
WHO recommends there should be one doctor dedicated to every 1000 individuals. Whereas, as per the current scenario, we have doctors per individuals ratio of barely 0.6:1000. Also, training doctors for proficiency is expensive as well as time consuming. Moreover, it is not feasible for rural people to reach out for every small yet critical medical assistance from an expert doctor in the urban location.
Thus, the e-health wing of the National Health Portal (NHP) is set up with a vision of providing affordable, high quality health services for all Indians. Without overlooking the problem of unsafe data transmission while providing the telemedicine services in Udaipur, there is a set of Electronic Health Records (EHR) standards established in 2016 that ensure completely safe information transit.
Providing medical assistance is just one side of the problem, which has been solved by the government, various NGOs and individuals to a greater extent. The other big problem that stands tall is the lack of awareness in the rural audience about the wise array of diseases and outbreaks.
What Is Anhad Doing?
Anhad is a Non-profit organization that aims to catalyze the change, to empower the crippled healthcare in the rural area. We aim to idealize the under-served communities in India and educate and empower them with the correct medical services at the right time. We are striving to provide immediate remediation, counselling referral, continued beneficiary support of primary healthcare in under-served areas, in the most cost effective way. We believe telemedicine services alone are not the solution to all the problems, infact, it is just the preliminary step. We have taken a challenge to eliminate the lack of awareness and lack of availability of healthcare services, thereby empowering the nation with affordable healthcare.