IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

The three-day workshop scheduled at NIT-T campus from July 12 to 14, is the first of its kind to be hosted by an academic institution, according to coordinators S. Raghavan, professor, ECE department, and N.Sivakumaran, faculty, ICE department, NIT-T. Super specialists from medical institutions and engineers with expertise in telemedicine will participate.

In a bid to combat heartburn, a common but much-neglected health problem, the SCB Medical College and Hospital has launched a novel programme to educate doctors working at the grassroots and raise awareness in the community by using Telemedicine.

Heartburn has emerged one of the commonest health complaints of modern day, yet lack of awareness, proper diagnosis and treatment is forcing people to suffer. More than seven per cent of the population in Odisha are afflicted by heartburn and the number is rising. The excruciating condition, main symptom of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), is no longer restricted to urban and developed regions but is increasingly penetrating into rural areas.

The planned centre is aimed at tele-consultations, manpower development in the field of tele-medicine & bio-medical informatics and continued medical education in the eastern and north-eastern parts of India.

The Centre shall also have facilities for training and teaching different cadres of health professionals. It will have a specialized tele-ophthalmology facility for screening diabetic retinopathy and cataract.

The RRC would function under the National Telemedicine Network and be responsible for monitoring the telemedicine activities in eastern region of the country. The eastern States have been left out as the six RRCs are located at PGIMER, Chandigarh; AIIMS, New Delhi; KEM Hospital, Mumbai; JIPMER Pudducherry and NEIGRIHMS, Shillong covering other parts of the country.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington have developed a way to make telemedicine more affordable and sustainable in remote parts of India.

Telemedicine is a way of using telecommunication and information technology to provide healthcare from a distance and is particularly useful in remote rural regions where access to medical care is sparse.

The centre will be run in Public-Private Partnership (PPP)mode by the State Government and Odisha Trust of Technical Education and Training (OTTET).

The telemedicine activities will include consultation for preliminary diagnosis, expert opinion, scheduling appointment for hospital visits, pre-surgical investigation, post surgical follow-up and patient counselling.

Though telemedicine service was being provided at MKCG Medical for the last five years, it was confined only to doctors who were using it to consult experts in the country and outside.

Launching the public private partnership (PPP) initiative at City Hospital here, health minister Damodar Rout said patients from rural areas can get timely and quality services through the network without going to major hospitals in far off places. By June, all the 30 districts will be covered by the programme, he added.

The Telemedicine Society of India (TSI), Odisha Chapter, has come forward to partner with the private sector to take telemedicine systems to blocks, panchayats and villages. It will be part of the initiative to ensure health care accessible to people in most remote and far-flung pockets of the State.

Renowned physicians, including surgery specialist Chandra Sekhar Tripathy, anesthesia specialist BK Mishra, Dr S Patnaik and Dr Indrani Das of Puri district, who have taken a lot of efforts to popularise telemedicine, will render their services from the hospital.

The inclusion of the districts unveils a new era in health services delivery system in the State as people of backward and remote areas would be spared of the travails and troubles of having to run to the referral hospitals as they would get speciality consultations through video conferencing right at the DHH of their own region. They would be provided treatment advise and procedures and will not have to go to the MCHs unless extremely necessary.

This service is being named as "Arogya Vani".

Mr V B Patil, commissioner, Department of Health and Family Welfare and Dr Balaji Utla, CEO, HMRI, in the presence of Mr M Madan Gopal, principal secretary to Government of Karnataka, Health and Family Welfare signed the agreement on March 6, 2013.

“User trials have been successful in sub-zero temperatures and received well by senior officials of the Indian Army and Navy. Both the forces have expressed keen interest for speedy induction of Telemedicine System into the forces, while Indian Air Force has also applauded the same,” said the DRDO spokesperson Ravi Gupta. He further disclosed that although developed chiefly for the armed forces, Telemedicine System may be within reach of civilian populace in remote places of India soon, just like various technologies developed by DRDO in the past has found use in civilian population as well.

Telemedicine has taken a giant leap in India with the setting up of eICUs, where critical-care specialists monitor biological parameters realtime and treat patients battling for their lives sitting hundreds of kilometers away.

To improve healthcare services in the remote parts of the country, the Planning Commission has suggested adopting telemedicine by using software applications such as Skype in its report on health for the 12th Five-Year plan.

Telemedicine is the remote diagnosis and treatment of patients by means of telecommunications technology. The 12th Plan starts on 1 April.

At around 10 am, the telemedicine centre of SGPGIMS hooked on with the Patan medical institute in Nepalese capital Kathmandu and at the same time with PGI Chandigarh establishing a closer link between the three medical institutes that would cater to the patients in the time of crisis.

SGPGIMS had earlier established such a link with Holy Family Hospital in Rawalpindi in Pakistan through high bandwidth ISDN. It is also in the process of helping out the Afghanistan government, which has sought its assistance for a medical institute in Kabul. In fact, the institute with 50 seats would be constructed with the help of Indian government.

“Science is advancing at monumental speed specially in healthcare particularly Genomes. Satellite centres with telemedicine are coming up in various states,” said Sibal at the launch of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital’s Research Center.

“This is an experiment to create a completely different kind of telemedicine model,” said Mr Kaveh Safavi, Vice-President and Global Lead, Healthcare Practice Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco, a global networking company.

This method can be applied in the continuing medical education of the rural doctors and in introducing miniaturized bioinstrumentation to monitor patients and later transfer it to the specialists, he said.