"We can become tele-medical hub of the world": Additional CEO, Ayushman Bharat

NASSCOM CoE for IoT/AI, under its Healthcare initiative LHIF, organized a virtual conference themed 'The Fourth Dimension - Deciphering Telehealth', which also witnessed the launch of an exclusive research paper titled "Unraveling AI for Healthcare in India" by Lav Agarwal, IAS, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. 

The research paper was commissioned by NASSCOM Research team in collaboration with EY; it highlights how AI solutions can break the classic healthcare iron triangle providing quality care with improved accessibility and reduced cost. The report also showcases the AI enablement ecosystem in healthcare and lays down strategic bold plays for healthcare organizations to accelerate their AI adoption journey.

Talking on Telehealth and how India can leverage technology, Chief Guest Lav Agarwal, IAS, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare said, “We have ongoing programme National Medical Network and we have created a structure for them which has National centre and several regional centres that will become the hub for telemedicine services. Then we have e-sanjeevni application developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Mohali; we are strengthening the application by making all the centres to start using this application and right now 24 states are using this application. We are the biggest tele-medicine provider in the world today. To make this application more robust, our friends can come up with good ideas. Can we have a chatbox on top of this application which can provide information to the consumer and can it be integrated in such a manner so that application starts thinking of clinical support decisions. ” 

One positive side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic is the dominance of Telemedicine Platforms for patient/doctor consultations, especially when the social distancing is prevalent. 

Saying that India was very prompt in coming up with tele-medicine guidelines when the lockdown was announced, Dr. Praveen Gedam, IAS, Additional CEO, Ayushman Bharat, National Health Authority, Govt. of India, added, “The advantage that India has for AI-based clinical support system is the sheer amount of data that we have as it will help in a better quality of additional support systems. E-sanjeevani has already crossed 3 lakh consultations and MHA is already making one more tele-medicine platform. We want more such platforms so that people can benefit from the competition. We already are medical tourism hub and we can now become tele-medicine hub for the world also. We can scale up very fast as is evident from the success of the Aarogya Setu app, which reached 130-140 million downloads in a couple of months.”

Meanwhile, other speakers discussed at length about ‘Ethical & Legal Contours around TeleHealth’ and ‘Leveraging Telehealth for Health Insurance’.