New Delhi: Health Ministry’s eSanjeevani OPD platform has completed the landmark milestone of four lakh teleconsultations. Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh are the top-performing states and have logged in 1,33,167 and 1,00,124 sessions, respectively.
The other states that have registered highest consultations through eSanjeevani and eSanjeevani OPD platforms are Himachal Pradesh (36,527), Kerala (33,340), Andhra Pradesh (31,034), Uttarakhand (11,526), Gujarat (8,914), Madhya Pradesh (8,904), Karnataka (7,684) and Maharashtra (7,103).
The usage trend shows that there has been quick uptake of this service in smaller districts like Villupuram in Tamil Nadu. Over 16,000 consultations have been recorded from Villupuram, which is the topmost district in terms of teleconsultation services availed by the beneficiaries.
Nationally eSanjeevani platform is being used by 26 states and over 12,000 practitioners of various state government health departments have been on-boarded on eSanjeevani and their services have been sought by people from 510 districts of the country.
The last 1,00,000 consultations have come up in 18 days, whereas the first 1,00,000 consultations had taken around three months. eSanjeevani OPD services have enabled patient-to-doctor telemedicine in midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. This has helped in containing the spread of Covid by ensuring physical distancing and has simultaneously enabled provisions for non-Covid essential healthcare.
Around 20 per cent of patients have sought health services through eSanjeevani more than once. The trend is indicative of the fact that this digital platform for delivery of health services remotely has been adopted by both the service providers as well as the users. A few states have been providing health services for 12 hours a day and seven days a week.
Initially, eSanjeevani OPD was rolled out as an online platform for general OPD service, but considering its utility and the uptake by the public, State Health Departments wished to roll-out speciality OPDs as well. Accordingly, eSanjeevani OPD was enhanced to support multiple concurrent speciality and super speciality OPDs as well.
On Saturday, eSanjeevani OPD is running 196 online OPDs which include 27 general OPDs and 169 speciality and super-speciality OPDs in 24 states. Premier institutions like AIIMS Bathinda, AIIMS Rishikesh, AIIMS Bibinagar, Lady Hardinge Medical College and Associated Hospitals, Regional Cancer Centre (Thiruvananthapuram), Cochin Cancer Centre (Ernakulam) are also using eSanjeevani platform to provide speciality services to the patients across the states.
The Central Government Health Scheme has also set up four specialities OPDs on eSanjeevani to provide health services to their beneficiaries in New Delhi. The CGHS is planning to extend these telemedicine services to their beneficiaries in other States as well.
States have also designed innovative applications of this telemedicine platform. In Kerala, eSanjeevani platform is being used for providing health services to the inmates of Palakkad District Jail. In Tamil Nadu, eSanjeevani has enabled practitioners to make life-saving interventions while providing for the patients in their homes.
eSanjeevani platform of the Union Health Ministry has been developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Mohali. It is an innovative digital platform globally to be set up by a government for delivering health services.
eSanjeevani supports two types of telemedicine services viz. Doctor-to-Doctor (eSanjeevani) and Patient-to-Doctor (eSanjeevani OPD) Tele-consultations. The former is an important pillar of the Ayushman Bharat Health and Wellness Centre (AB-HWCs) programme.
This was rolled out in November 2019. It aims to implement teleconsultation in all the 1.5 lakh Health and Wellness Centres in a ‘Hub and Spoke’ model, by December 2022. States need to identify and set up dedicated ‘Hubs’ in Medical Colleges and District hospitals to provide teleconsultation services to ‘Spokes’, i.e, SHCs and PHCs.
The Health Ministry rolled out the second teleconsultation service ‘eSanjeevani OPD’ enabling patient-to-doctor telemedicine on April 13 of this year owing to the Covid-19 pandemic.
