45 Telemedicine centres in Two years

THE health-care infrastructure is to get a big boost, as there is a move to provide tele-medicine facility at 45 of the 72 district-level civil hospitals in the region,  says Dr K C Bhattacharjee, Director of North Eastern Space Applications Centre (NESAC). In the first phase, 15 government-owned district hospitals will receive telemedicine connectivity, followed by 30 more in the second phase. The target date for implementation of the two phases of the project is 2005, he said. The approximate cost of each telemedicine centre is Rs.15 lakhs. GMC Hospital in Guwahati acquired the first telemedicine centre in January this year. The second centre was opened at the STNM Hospital in Gangtok in August. The third centre has come up at the Shillong civil hospital. Highlighting the importance of the telemedicine centres, Dr Bhattacharjee said “ More than 98 per cent of the doctors in the country are based in the urban areas while only two per cent being located in the rural areas.” This has resulted in an inequitable distribution of doctors in the rural areas. The situation has been compounded by the fact that there are very few good hospitals in the rural and semi-urban areas. Given the limited financial resources of the country the situation is unlikely to drastically change in the near future.

“The telemedicine centres will help reduce the distance between the doctors based in the towns and cities and the patients residing in the remote and inaccessible areas”, opines the NESAC Director.   While the district level hospitals will be connected to the GMC Hospital, the latter in turn will be connected with the AIIMS, PGI (Chandigarh), Apollo and other super-speciality hospitals in the metros.