Indian Govt’s telemedicine service surpasses 3 million consultations with daily average of 35k patients

Photo Credits: AFP

The National Telemedicine service called as eSanjeevani has reached another milestone after completing total of 3 million consultations on Wednesday as per the statement issued on Wednesday by the government. Presently, the telephone consultation service has been operational in 31 states and Union territories of the country, and has taken more than 35,000 patients, said the statement.

The statement further added, “In a short span of time the government of India’s National Telemedicine Service has started aiding the Indian healthcare delivery system by plugging the digital health divide that exists in urban and rural India. It is also addressing the shortage of doctors and specialists at ground level while reducing the burden on secondary and tertiary level hospitals. In line with the National Digital Health Mission eSanjeevani is also boosting the digital health ecosystem in the country.”

The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare started the consultation services comprising of two types- eSanjeevani AB-HWC and eSanjeevani OPD. The e-Sanjeevani AB-HWC service basically consists of doctor-to-doctor telemedicine platform which has been enforced under the Ayushman Bharat scheme. The platform will be made operational under 155,000 health and wellness centres till December 2022 as per the statement.

The e-Sanjeevani OPD is a telemedicine platform between patient-doctor which intends to provide health services to the patients via utilization of online OPDs. Ever since its launch in 2020, 2,100,100 patients have used the services of the platform for obtaining health consultations.

The statement further added, “Nationally, over 31,000 doctors and paramedics have been trained and on boarded eSanjeevani, of these around 14,000 doctors practice telemedicine on eSanjeevaniOPD and over 17,000 doctors and community health officers use eSanjeevaniAB-HWC.”

The government revealed that Sanjeevani OPD services will also be launched on the IOS application store which will boost the coverage of the national telemedicine service throughout the country. Tamil Nadu has the highest consultations with a count of 642, 708 through the eSanjeevani platform, after which Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka takes the lead with 631,019 and 607, 305 consultations respectively followed by Andhra Pradesh with 216,860 consultations and Madhya Pradesh with 204, 296 consultations.