Centre's telemedicine service completes 5 lakh consultations

NEW DELHI: eSanjeevani, the Union Ministry of Health's telemedicine initiative, is rapidly gaining popularity amongst patients and doctors and has recorded five lakh teleconsultations in a short span of time.

The last one lakh consultations were completed in a record time of 17 days.

As a digital modality of healthcare services delivery, eSanjeevani is gradually shaping into a parallel stream for the Indian healthcare delivery system with the number of daily teleconsultations on the platform touching the 8,000 mark in the last few days.

At present, 26 states are using eSanjeevani's two variants of telemedicine, namely - doctor to doctor (eSanjeevaniAB-HWC) and patient to doctor (eSanjeevaniOPD).

SanjeevaniAB-HWC is functional at around 4,000 Health and Wellness Centres and onboarding of an equal number of HWCs is underway.

Launched in November 2019, it is to be implemented at 1,55,000 Health and Wellness Centres in conjunction with identified Medical College hospitals under the Centre's Ayushman Bharat Scheme in a 'hub and spoke' model by December 2022.

The second variant of this ambitious initiative, eSanjeevaniOPD which has the potential of being the world's largest telemedicine platform, was rolled out on April 13 this year, during the first lockdown when the OPDs across the country were closed.

SanjeevaniOPD enables access to OPD services by the patients in the confines of their homes, and has been accepted evenly by both patients and doctors. (IANS)

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