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Telemedicine clinic to open in India
Author : Pharmacy Choice
Published: May 4, 2012
India's Apollo Hospitals group is set to open a clinic, information centre and telemedicine network aimed at connecting this part of the world to other experts around the world without having to travel there.
The move is likely to reduce the amount of money spent by Ugandans to travel abroad for specialised medical care. The plan to establish a diagnostic clinic and information centre was announced by Dr Anupam Sibal, the group medical director and senior Paediatric Gastroenterologist and Hepatologist Apollo Hospital group at Hotel Africana recently.
Once the telecentres have been established, patients will travel only if they have to. These technologies permit communications between patient and medical staff with both convenience and fidelity, as well as the transmission of medical, imaging and health informatics data from one site to another. A doctor in India can offer a second opinion and help with diagnosing a patient in Uganda via a camera unit.
The doctors can also follow up the progress of patients they have treated and have since returned to their homes thousands of kilometres away. To achieve this, Apollo Hospitals plans to use its senior doctors to share experience with colleagues in Uganda. The Group Medical director stressed his Indian counterparts' experience and how they would work with the Ugandan doctors.
"With the experience of treating more than 20 million patients from 120 countries, 6.2 million preventative health checks, more than 125,000 open heart surgeries, 8000 kidney transplants, 850 liver transplants and cast experience in Orthopaedics, Oncology, Neurosciences and Pediatrics, Apollo can help provide training facilities for clinical and non-clinical personnel from the region," he said.
This will be done through forging partnerships with various medical organizations, hospitals and non-government organisations (NGOs). He also noted that prevention and early diagnosis is one of the developing countries' biggest problems and hence the establishment of the diagnostic centre first.
Telemedicine is the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance. It helps eliminate distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities. It is also used to save lives in critical care and emergency situations. India is the leading destination for medical tourists, a term used to describe the rapidly-growing practice of travelling across international borders to obtain healthcare.
Treatment costs in India start at around a tenth of the price of comparable treatment in America or Britain. The most popular treatments sought in India are alternative medicine, bone-marrow transplant, cardiac bypass, eye surgery and hip replacement. India is known in particular for heart surgery, hip resurfacing and other areas of advanced medicine.
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