[Reader-list] Telemedicine

[amit chavan]

Telemedicine: Medicine from distance

 

A. Chavan

 

I am a Master�s student, in Chicago, majoring in Telecommunication with minor in Digital Image Processing. I am part of a team, trying to build Medical Image Query System for PDAs. This system allows the doctor to compare current patients x-ray, ct-scan, MRI, ECG, EEG, EMG and other radiological images with similar images in the hospital�s archives, refer to the other doctors diagnosis, treatments, and its effects in similar cases. Since this system is designed for PDAs, doctors can avail this facility even on their visits. While working on this project, I was exposed to field of telemedicine in USA. I feel, telemedicine begin a very contemporary field, hasn�t got full recognition in India. Telemedicine means diagnosing the patient and prescribing appropriate medicines, from remote location. Under this program, primary medical centers in remote, inaccessible locations are linked with specialty hospitals, in the city thus, improving healthcare solutions in these remote areas.
 Telemedicine eliminates the need for the patients to make a costly trip to towns and cities as it allows doctors in rural areas to take advice of specialist in handling the complicated medical problems, without any need to get out of their office. Underdeveloped countries like India; with maximum population living in rural areas without basic healthcare can exploit this technology, with maximum effect.

 

Telemedicine involves transferring several, along with other data, medical images, and setting up videoconference sessions; these activities need high bandwidth. Lack of network infrastructure is one of the reasons behind lack of telemedicine penetration in India. To give you a fair idea of what I mean, consider this: I read about a hospital, in Calcutta being connected to three health care centers through a 384Kbps line. And I have a 1.5Mbps (almost a T1 line) DSL connection for my home PC, in Chicago. 384Kbps line might not be able to support seamless data transfer, especially in multi-user environment. I have also read about several pilot programs launched by ISRO, which uses INSAT (Indian National Satellite) to link hospitals. Success of these pilot programs can provide the necessary media to connect most of the far-flung locations.

Further, according to Express Healthcare Management, �Success of telemedicine requires evolving an effective operations and revenue model for making the telemedicine facility self-sustainable through innovative health insurance schemes with public and private institutions partnerships for assuring quality health care to the citizens�. 

I will definitely like to work on projects like Deploying a High Speed Network, Medical Image Query System, etc. in India. However, as long as above-mentioned factors are not overcome and a proper Data Protection Law is not implemented (refer to �Privacy fears Before Telemedicine Debut�), we will have to wait. 



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