New Delhi (NVI): The ‘eSanjeevani’ telemedicine initiative of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare today completed the landmark achievement of 9 lakh tele-consultations since its launch.
“The top performing states, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh have registered in 2,90,770 and 2,44,211 consultations, respectively,” the Ministry of Health said in a statement.
The other states that have registered highest consultations through eSanjeevani and eSanjeevani OPD platforms includes Kerala (60,401), Madhya Pradesh (57,569), Gujarat (52,571), Himachal Pradesh (48,187), Andhra Pradesh (37,681), Uttarakhand (29,146), Karnataka (26,906), and Maharashtra (10,903), it added.
The ministry stated that, telemedicine is a new modality for remote diagnosis and treatment of patients over internet and eSanjeevani enables meetings between the patients and doctors, specialists from geographically dispersed locations, through video conferencing that occurs in real time.
“At the end of these remote consultations, eSanjeevani generates an electronic prescriptions which can be used for sourcing medicines,” it said.
As many as 28 States have on-boarded the eSanjeevani two variants of telemedicine namely – doctor to doctor (eSanjeevani AB-HWC) in hub and spoke model and patient to doctor (eSanjeevani OPD).
These states are aggressively working towards long term enablement of telemedicine services.
It has been one year since eSanjeevani Ayushman Bharat-HWC was rolled out in
November last year and eSanjeevani AB-HWC has completed over 1,83,000 consultations so far, the Health Ministry data shows.
On the other hand, eSanjeevani OPD is a telemedicine variant for public to seek health services remotely, was rolled out on April 13, during the first nationwide lockdown in the country. In order to enable delivery of outpatient services during COVID-19 pandemic.
So far, more than 7,16,000 consultations have been recorded on eSanjeevani OPD that is hosting over 240 online OPDs which include general OPDs and speciality OPDs. Both the variants of eSanjeevani are rapidly evolving in terms of use and capacity and functionalities.
Furthermore, team of eSanjeevani at C-DAC Mohali is also closely working with Ministry of Health to address the requirements of states.
The ministry is in regular touch with States to formulate strategies for extending the reach of eSanjeevani services to the underprivileged section of the society too, the statement said.
“Few States like Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat etc., are experimenting various models to provision eSanjeevani services for non-IT savvy as well as poor patients who do not have access to the internet,” it added.
-RJV