Rural areas reap benefits of telemedicine
16 Aug 2008, 0430 hrs IST, Nirmala M Nagaraj,TNN
Telemedicine (the use of telecommunications to assist in the provision of medical services) is making it possible for cardiologists, neurologists or radiologists to attend to patients in rural India. For the past seven years, through video-conferencing of patients and doctors, 85,595 ECGs and 25,000 teleconsultations have been done, apart from 1,06,000 thrombosis cases by the 56 telemedicine centres in ten states. Even the postal service (Hrudaya Post) is being used where trained postal staff feed the data online (prescription, X-ray, ECG report, angiogram) for specialist consultation, a review report is sent within 24 hours, and the patient collects the report at the counter or at its doorstep (for an extra fee).
Lectures
2. Issues and Contexts.
27. MULTIMEDIA IR (12/1) – X-Rays as Multimedia retrieved by medical personnel
Bob Glushko Said,
September 5, 2008 @ 6:29 pm
Fascinating article, and is important as it is that we can now do sensor transmissions like ECGs, or video consultation between a remote physician and an onsite one, I think that Bob didn’t even mention the most amazing part of the emerging telemedicine story, which is “robotic surgery.”
“The first four paediatric liver transplantations at our hospitals were conducted through anaesthetic intervention through telemedicine from Children Hospital Philadelphia (CHP). We’ll be conducting robotic prostate surgery through telemedicine from CHP very soon,” he said.
But this is very very scary to me, given what i know about the reliability of the telecom infrastructure in India. It is one thing if the connection goes down when you’re doing an ECG or chatting about a patient, but if the robot surgeon has opened up a patient and is in the middle of cutting something…