New Delhi (NVI): The ‘eSanjeevani’ telemedicine service platform of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has completed the landmark milestone of 4 lakh doctor-to-patient tele-consultations.
“The top performing states, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh have logged in 1,33,167 and 1,00,124 sessions, respectively,” the Ministry of Health said in a statement.
The other states that have registered highest consultations through eSanjeevani and eSanjeevani OPD platforms are Himachal Pradesh (36,527), Kerala (33,340), Andhra Pradesh (31,034), Uttarakhand (11,526), Gujarat (8914), Madhya Pradesh (8904), Karnataka (7684), Maharashtra (7103), it added.
The ministry said the usage trend shows that there has been a quick uptake of this service in smaller districts like Villupuram in Tamil Nadu.
“Over 16,000 consultations have been recorded from Villupuram, which is the topmost district in terms of tele-consultation services availed of by the beneficiaries,” it added.
Nationally eSanjeevani platform is being used by 26 States and over 12,000 practitioners of various state government health departments have been on-boarded on eSanjeevani and their services have been sought by people from 510 districts of the country.
The last 100,000 consultations have come up in 18 days, whereas the first 100,000 consultations had taken around three months.
“eSanjeevani OPD services have enabled patient-to-doctor telemedicine in midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, launched on April 13 of this year owing to the pandemic.This has helped in containing the spread of the virus by ensuring physical distancing and has simultaneously enabled provisions for non-COVID essential healthcare,” the statement said.
Furthermore, around 20 per cent patients have sought health services through eSanjeevani more than once, the ministry noted.
The trend is indicative of the fact that this digital platform for delivery of health services remotely has been adopted by both the service providers as well as the users. A few states have been providing services for 12 hours a day and 7 days a week.
Initially, eSanjeevani OPD was rolled out as an online platform for general OPD service, but considering its utility and the uptake by the public, State Health Departments wished to rolled-out speciality OPDs as well.
Accordingly, eSanjeevani OPD was enhanced to support multiple concurrent speciality and super speciality OPDs. Today eSanjeevani OPD is running 196 online OPDs which include 27 general OPDs and 169 speciality and super-speciality OPDs in 24 States, the ministry stated.
The ministry further stated, “eSanjeevani platform of the Union Health Ministry has been developed by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Mohali.”
It is an innovative digital platform globally to be set up by government for delivering health services. The platform supports two types of telemedicine services — Doctor-to-Doctor (eSanjeevani) and Patient-to-Doctor (eSanjeevani OPD) Tele-consultations, the ministry added.
-RJV
