Health ministry's telemedicine service eSanjeevani completes 9 lakh consultations

The Union health ministry's national telemedicine initiative eSanjeevani completed nine lakh consultations on Wednesday, with Tamil Nadu recording the highest number of services obtained followed by Uttar Pradesh and Kerala.

The top 10 states with the 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), the health ministry said.

Telemedicine is a new modality for remote diagnosis and treatment of patients over the internet.

The eSanjeevani platform enables virtual meetings between patients and doctors or specialists from geographically dispersed locations through video-conferencing.

At the end of these remote consultations, eSanjeevani generates an electronic prescription, which can be used to source medicines, the ministry said in a statement.

In order to enable 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, it said. These states are aggressively working towards long-term enablement of telemedicine services.

The Ministry of Health has launched two variants of eSanjeevani -- 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 5,000 spokes have been set up by various states. eSanjeevani AB-HWC has completed over 1,83,000 consultations, the statement said.

The eSanjeevaniOPD is a telemedicine variant for the 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 speciality OPDs. Both the variants of eSanjeevani are rapidly evolving in terms of use and capacity and functionalities, the statement said.

The eSanjeevani team at C-DAC Mohali is closely working with the health ministry to address the requirements of the states. The health ministry is in regular touch with the states to formulate strategies for extending the reach of eSanjeevani services to the underprivileged section of the society too.

A few states like Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat etc are experimenting various models to provision eSanjeevani services for non-IT savvy as well as poor patients who do not have access to the internet, the statement added.