About the author

Major General Ashok Kumar Singh (retd) from the Indian Army has served all over India – Lucknow, Assam, Mizoram, Nagaland, Agartala, Delhi, Pune, Srinagar, Udhampur and many other places and been on official duties and attended conferences in Austria, Bhutan, Canada, and Sweden. His area of interest is rural health through telemedicine. He is currently serving as an Advisor in Health Informatics at Mahatma Gandhi University of Medical Sciences and Technology at Sitapura, Jaipur. He is also running a BSc course in Hospital and Health Information Administration.

The post Telemedicine Force Multiplier for Healthcare Delivery appeared first on InnoHEALTH magazine.

India is a country full of contradictions, has bullock carts to the dream of Chandrayan landing on the moon. It is taking the plunge towards new India trying to meet expectations of its 1.3 billion population. The present government is trying to push many initiatives to make India’s place in developed economies of the world.

The unmet needs of healthcare are many, can innovations leapfrog to achieve healthcare at optimum cost with improved quality. India has one bed per thousand population while WHO recommends 3.5 beds per thousand population; 70% rural population is served by only 30% medical assets like physicians, nurses, paramedics, and hospital beds while 30% urban population has 70% medical resources.

The emphasis today is on curative medicine instead of public health and prevention of diseases. This trend needs to be reversed and more emphasis should be on Wellness and Prevention. The efforts have been started by the Prime Minister of India by launching Wellness centers in rural India, Swachh Bharat, and Fit India to name a few but community participation is yet to reach its pinnacle to make these movements successful.

The problems of healthcare are known but the need of the time is a solution of optimum cost to fix unmet needs in a time-bound fashion. The political will is there to take Indian healthcare into a new direction and to achieve desired results; the service providers and the community need to support it whole-heartedly.

India had launched many initiatives in the past like Health For All by 2000, National Rural Health Mission and is a part of Sustainable Development Goals. All initiatives were good but did not achieve the desired results since regular monitoring and impact analysis was missing. Every time a new initiative replaced an old one, with a new name though, it is like old wine in a new bottle.

There are many challenges that should be converted into opportunities to achieve the targets set in the National Health Policy. These are to be achieved by the adoption of the right technology, legislating and enforcing new policies for benefit of have nots. The buzz word of INNOVATION is ringing but it has yet to reach its right place, we are far below in global innovation index. The disruptive, frugal innovations have to achieve the objective of Health For All – an old dictum. The biggest challenge is behavior modification of all sections of the society which needs correction by regular awareness programs and health check-ups in all organizations and institutions including schools and colleges. We all need to change our attitude towards our health to achieve overall holistic health.

We are moving away from our old Indian values, leading to many unhealthy practices, while the western world has adopted Yoga from us, we have copied junk food from them. Let us pledge to move fast to meet our Unmet Needs to achieve Health For All missed in 2000.

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