For any government, ensuring that all citizens have accessto quality healthcare is a fundamental responsibility and an essential economicfunction. Healthcare must be accessible, affordable, and responsive, both tothe constantly changing medical and clinical needs of patients as well as tothe broader demographic, social, and cultural shifts that typify the modernworld.
Telemedicine employs collaborative technologies to facilitate a virtualdoctor-patient encounter. These solutions combine voice, video, medical data,and collaboration tools, to facilitate a patient to see a doctor, withouthaving to travel long distances. They enable patients, providers, and alliedhealth workers to come together on a common platform and collaborate in realtime.
Such solutions give doctors tremendous flexibility to divide their time betweenvirtual and physical consultations. They allow patients to be seen quicklywithout delay, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare andclinical outcomes. Telemedicine solutions are designed to work on a lowerbandwidth, enabling healthcare providers to serve patients in remote locations,where last mile connectivity is a lingering problem. They are flexible, and donot need expensive infrastructure or dedicated space. They can be set up prettymuch anywhere, as long as there is the minimum bandwidth.
Patients can present themselves at any location be it a medical kiosk in aremote village, retail centre, corporate office, or their own home. Thesolutions can also be set up in a Mobile Health Unit e.g. a bus or ambulance,which would allow healthcare services to be provided to remote locations,circumventing the issue of delay in getting together specialists, nurses, andphysicians to these locations.
The Mobile Health Unit, equipped with essential drugs, biomedical devices,laboratory equipment, and disposables, can go from place to place, providinghealthcare services to the underserved communities and rural citizens. Theseunits can be quickly mobilised to areas which require urgent healthcareservices in the event of calamities like floods, earthquakes, epidemicoutbreaks, etc. This allows the central pool of doctors and specialists to belocated at a hospital and provide consultation on demand to remote locations.
Telemedicine solutions allow doctors to capture, store, and retrieve patientdetails such as demographics, patient history, allergies, clinical findings,vitals and medications. Readings from the medical devices are made available tothe clinician to facilitate a quicker and more accurate diagnosis. Thephysician or the specialist can also write prescriptions digitally. The userfriendly interface and the flexibility to integrate these solutions withexisting Hospital Information System and Electronic Medical Records, make themeasy to use, deploy, manage and economical to run and maintain.
