Telemedicine — The Current Scenario in India
The healthcare sector is at an ever-growing pace with immense scope for further development. The advent of technology use in the healthcare sphere has been radically changing the industry dynamics. The eHealth services and equipment have paved huge opportunities for the healthcare sector to expand its reach and services to the remote consumers. Telemedicine is one among the fast-emerging segments of health care that is gaining immense attention for its extensive growth and usage.
This emerging concept of telemedicine has contributed a lot in revenues, offering extensive convenience and enhanced health care services. The use of telemedicine in healthcare services delivery is outperforming other segments in the recent years with a CAGR of 20.4% in 2010–2015. Read more at http://www.indiainfoline.com/article/news-top-story/india-telemedicine-market-to-cross-rs-200-cr-by-2020-ken-research-116032100321_1.html
Telemedicine has opened up possibilities for medical professionals to treat patients more efficiently and conveniently. Most of the hospitals today are implementing e-health services and equipment in various spheres of their healthcare services and hold vast potential for growth in the upcoming decades.
What is Telemedicine?
As an emerging field in healthcare, Telemedicine is a synergy of medical science and Information technology. It can be defined as the delivery of healthcare services using information and communication technology to exchange or transmit information and records for the reason of treatment, diagnosis, and prevention of diseases and injuries. An even broader term of Digital Health encompasses telemedicine, mHealth or mobile Health, as well as eHealth.
Now both tele and mobile health are being used for continuing education, research, and evaluation of healthcare providers for advancing the community / individual healthcare, despite the distance factor.
How is Telemedicine Enhancing Healthcare Delivery?
The concept of telemedicine has become increasingly useful in the healthcare sector, particularly, to reach out to rural and remote regions, where direct healthcare delivery is hard to access. However, today, it is also being used in several other applications in healthcare management, training, and education.
Telemedicine can be anything from the discussion of health professionals for seeking advice over patient problems, to complex transmission of medical records, clinical information, and diagnostic tests results through technical devices. Telemedicine uses high bandwidth for information transmissions for video conferences, broadcasting, and virtual reality.
Several common medical devices are also adapted for use with telemedicine and mobile technology. Today, many state-of-the-art hospitals indulge in interactive real-time medical video conferences with desktop or mobile based software and hardware or even by using mobile / satellite / terrestrial network telecommunication or broadband media connections.
In India, telemedicine is gaining progressive advances due to further technological development. Telemedicine aims to provide healthcare services beyond geographic, time, and social barriers. Usually, these services are targeted towards remote regions where there is a shortage of physicians or specialists.
Today, Telemedicine is emerging as one of the critical components of the healthcare solution that facilitates healthcare delivery and distribution, with significant impact on cost and convenience.
Benefits of Telemedicine:
Telemedicine is an efficient and cost-effective solution to extend quality healthcare services to remote places where health care delivery is non-existent or practically inaccessible. It also helps increase the overall quality of patient care and satisfaction in healthcare services. The benefits of telemedicine extend beyond cost and convenience.
Increases access to healthcare:
Telemedicine targets offering healthcare and clinical services to remote patients and hospitals through the use of technology. Through the concept of telemedicine, patients in remote locations can more easily access and obtain any kind of clinical services. Moreover, hospitals in rural regions can be enabled to provide emergency and intensive care services with the aid of specialized professionals in urban locations.
Improves health outcomes:
Early diagnosis and treatment often provide improved health outcomes. Moreover, telemedicine offers reduced mortality rates and lesser complications as there is an immediate transmission of health records and data.
Reduces healthcare costs:
Since telemedicine is a cost-effective alternative to hospital stays, they reduce healthcare costs for patients. Home monitoring programs are better than high-cost hospital visits and stays. During times of emergencies, high-cost transfers and patient care can be reduced via telemedicine.
Overcome healthcare shortages:
In India, there is a great shortage for healthcare in rural areas because of irregular distribution of healthcare providers. Telemedicine helps combat the problem by assisting healthcare providers in addressing shortages and giving access to healthcare, irrespective of time and place when needed.
Access to specialists:
Medical specialists located in urban areas can serve patients at rural regions using Telemedicine technologies. Instead of driving to a medical practice, patients can get immediate access to the specialist from anywhere in the world through the concept of telemedicine. That way, telemedicine serves to significantly increase patient satisfaction.
Remote care/monitoring
Telemedicine has a strong role in facilitating collaborative care and continuity model. It creates the possibility of monitoring patient health remotely by collecting and sending medical data through electronic means for immediate interpretation. Such remote access/monitoring is greatly beneficial for homebound critical/emergency patients where constant monitoring is a must.
Indian Scenario
The rapid growth of telemedicine in the last few years appears to be standing as the next frontier in the healthcare field. Despite the challenges and risks involved in telemedicine, the demands of the healthcare industry in the near future can only be met by implementing effective and innovative telemedicine solutions. Overall, the upsurge of telemedicine has been changing the current paradigm of health care, allowing improved access to patient care along with enhanced health outcome in cost-effective ways.
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), Government of India has set up the National Telemedicine Portal: http://nmcn.in/
The integration of eHealth and telemedicine services is being done through the National Medical College Network (NMCN) by interlinking the Medical Colleges across the country with the purpose of e-Education and National Rural Telemedicine Network for e-Healthcare delivery. Considerable amount of effort has already been undertaken to give a shape to the project. Locations for the National Resource Centers and Regional Resource Centers for NMCN have been defined. The medical colleges to be linked to these five regional centers have also been worked out. Communication from MoHFW had been sent to all the states and Union Territories to provide the list of medical colleges to be networked and to nominate a faculty member from each medical college as Nodal Officer for Telemedicine. High speed optical fiber based Internet bandwidth been deployed under National Knowledge Network (NKN) Project in as many as 150 medical colleges around the country. Many Medical Institutions have migrated to NKN backbone to enhance their capacity of telemedicine activity using telemedicine platform deployed by Central and State government agencies.
The National Digital Health Authority of India (NDHAI) is in the process of being set up and has been clearly defined as an action item in the National Health Policy 2017. The MoHFW has already notified the Standards to be used for exchange of health information. The second edition of the standards was notified in December 2016. Further, an Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP) is being set up for exchange of health information in an interoperable manner.
Detailed and up to date information about these developments can be obtained from the EHR Standards Helpdesk of the National Health Portal: https://www.nhp.gov.in/ehr-standards-helpdesk_ms
Since the beginning of the telemedicine program in India by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in 2001: http://www.isro.gov.in/applications/tele-medicine
India has come a long way in adopting the evolving technology and making healthcare delivery accessible. The concept of Telemedicine in a Digital Village of Digital India is also being tried out through the Common Service Centres (CSCs) where private entrepreneurs are empowered and encouraged: https://www.csc.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=226&Itemid=398
To sum up, we are in exciting times and telemedicine, mHealth, tele-home care — all are waiting to take off strongly in near future.
Author :-
Prof. Suptendra Nath Sarbadhikari
Professor Health Information Technology at IIHMR Delhi
