Health Ministry’s telemedicine service e Sanjeevani completes 9 lakh consultations

Newdelhi:2/12/20:In a landmark achievement, eSanjeevani, Health Ministry’s national telemedicine initiative today completed 9 lakh consultations. The top ten States with highest consultations through eSanjeevani and eSanjeevaniOPD platforms are Tamil Nadu (2,90,770), Uttar Pradesh (2,44,211), Kerala (60,401), Madhya Pradesh (57,569), Gujarat (52,571), Himachal Pradesh (48,187), Andhra Pradesh (37,681), Uttarakhand (29,146), Karnataka (26,906), and Maharashtra (10,903).

Telemedicine is a new modality for remote diagnosis and treatment of patients over the internet. eSanjeevani enables virtual meetings between the patients and doctors & specialists from geographically dispersed locations, through video conferencing that occurs in real-time. At the end of these remote consultations, eSanjeevani generates an electronic prescriptions which can be used for sourcing medicines. In order to enable the delivery of outpatient services remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic as many as 28 States have on-boarded the Ministry of Health’s eSanjeevani initiative. These States are aggressively working towards the long term enablement of telemedicine services.

Ministry of Health & Family Welfare has launched two variants of eSanjeevani namely – doctor to doctor (eSanjeevani AB-HWC) in hub and spoke model and patient to doctor (eSanjeevaniOPD). It has been one year now that eSanjeevani Ayushman Bharat-HWC was rolled out. Andhra Pradesh was the first state to roll out eSanjeevaniAB-HWC services in November 2019 and since then around 240 hubs and over 5000 spokes have been set up by various States. eSanjeevani AB-HWC has completed over 1,83,000 consultations.

eSanjeevaniOPD is a telemedicine variant for public to seek health services remotely, it was rolled out on 13th of April 2020 during the first lockdown in the country. So far, over 7,16,000 consultations have been recorded on eSanjeevaniOPD that is hosting over 240 online OPDs which include general OPDs and specialty OPDs. Both the variants of eSanjeevani are rapidly evolving in terms of use and capacity and functionalities.

eSanjeevani Team at C-DAC Mohali is closely working with Ministry of Health to address the requirements of States. The Health Ministry is in regular touch with States to formulate strategies for extending the reach of eSanjeevani services to the underprivileged section of the society too. Few states like Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, etc., are experimenting with various models to provision eSanjeevani services for non-IT savvy as well as poor patients  who do not have access to the Internet.