90 lakh teleconsultations completed by National telemedicine service: Health ministry

New Delhi: The Union health ministry''s national telemedicine service has completed 90 lakh teleconsultations in the country with the last 10 lakh consultations being done in a record 17 days, according to official statement.

The top 10 states which have registered highest consultations through eSanjeevani and eSanjeevani OPD platforms are Andhra Pradesh (23,55,598), Karnataka (17,20,040), Tamil Nadu (14,28,680), Uttar Pradesh (11,82,949), Gujarat (3,88,191), Madhya Pradesh (333013), Maharashtra (3,03,185), Bihar (3,00,380), Kerala (228567), Uttarakhand (211280), it said.

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The government of India''s eSanjeevani initiative has gained popularity amongst doctors and patients across the country, according to the health ministry. New are users continuously adopting telemedicine as eSanjeevani, which has proved to be a feasible, easy to use, practical means of seeking health services remotely. This is evident from the fact that in the past one month, eSanjeevani network''s utilisation has gone up by a factor of around 1.5 times, the statement said.

The eSanjeevani platform has been consistently getting diffused in the ecosystem and currently it is serving 70,000 patients on a daily basis.

The national telemedicine service is serving patients through two variants namely -- doctor-to-doctor (eSanjeevaniAB-HWC) and patient-to-doctor (eSanjeevani OPD). eSanjeevani AB-HWC was launched by the health ministry in November 2019 under the government of India''s Ayushman Bharat scheme in ''Hub & Spoke'' model and by December 2022 it would be implemented at 1,55,000 health and wellness centres across India.

The eSanjeevaniAB-HWC is functional at over 25,000 health and wellness centres as spokes and these spokes are being served by medical officers, specialists and super-specialists seated in over 2,000 hubs.

The second version of this mammoth initiative -- eSanjeevani OPD -- was rolled out on April 13, 2020 during the first lockdown when the OPDs across the country were shutdown.

The eSanjeevaniOPD is enabling delivery of health services to patients in the confines of their homes. At present, it is hosting over 430 online OPDs, around 400 of these are speciality and super-speciality online OPDs. Over 60,000 doctors and healthworkers across the country have been trained on both the variants of eSanjeevani, the statement stated.

Considering the potential that telemedicine has, especially in view of the ongoing Covid pandemic, states and union territories are consistently working towards strengthening the IT infrastructure within the healthcare delivery setups.

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