A village woman in K’taka is shown using Cisco’s HealthPresence. (photo courtesy of Cisco)
U.S. technology giant Cisco Nov. 14 unveiled the second generation of its platform for telemedicine, known as Healthpresence, focusing its efforts on India where at least 175 million rural dwellers lack access to any health care services.
Healthpresence allows physicians in several countries to remotely conduct consultations with patients who may be hundreds of miles away. In India, private hospitals, the defense sector and state governments in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh have signed on to use Healthpresence; the service is already available in 11 districts and can be accessed by up to one million people.
“In India, there’s a huge mismatch between the availability of doctors and where they’re needed,” Vishal Gupta, vice president and general manager of Cisco Global Healthcare Solutions, told India-West by teleconference from Bangalore, where he is based. Patients must often travel hundreds of miles to see a physician, he said, noting that the need for doctors and specialists is most acute in rural India.
“We want to be the ATM of healthcare services,” said Gupta, envisioning Healthpresence kiosks in a variety of rural and semi-urban settings, such as malls.
An earlier version of the product, which was released two years ago, required Cisco’s Telepresence, a high bandwidth platform. But the version of Healthpresence rolled out by Cisco last week can be used on low bandwidth platforms, including desktop computers.
Healthpresence 2.0 features the flexibility to be used across several platforms, from a high-end Telepresence-based system, to a low bandwidth version which is portable and can be used in a mobile medicine van, said Gupta, noting that bandwidth is still an issue in many remote parts of India.
The new version of Healthpresence can be maintained on a server by a service provider who provides repairs and updates to the system, eliminating the need for an in-house IT specialist and lowering the overall cost, said Gupta.
Healthpresence patients sit in a special consulting room – known as a primary health care center – which has a screen allowing them to see their doctor, and specialized diagnostic equipment including a digitized stethoscope which allows a doctor to listen to his patient’s heart and lungs remotely.
A digitized torch and otoscope allow the physician to remotely examine a patient’s ears, nose and throat.
Healthpresence can also be used by specialists.
Sunita Maheshwari, a Bangalore-based pediatric cardiologist and founder of RxDx, which uses Healthpresence to connect to patients in the low-income district of Raichur in northen Karnataka, said Cisco’s product works very well in telemedicine.
“We were skeptical at first, wondering will rural India’s villages accept such technology. But they’re really thrilled because they have a doctor out there for the first time,” the Indian American Maheshwari, who was trained at Yale, told India-West.
RxDx remote clinics provide primary care doctors from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on a walk-in basis, and appointments can be made for consultations with specialists. The clinic has a staff of 70 physicians, with a mix of specialties, including pediatrics, and serves about 600 patients a month in Raichur, which is an overnight train journey from Bangalore.
Maheshwari – dubbed the “Queen of Hearts” by India Today magazine – said she hopes to next hook up with practices in remote states such as Bihar to provide Healthpresence services there. She estimated that one-quarter of India’s 700 million village dwellers – 175 million people – currently lack access to any healthcare services.
The Osmania University alumnus said the desktop version of Healthpresence was very scalable and could be used anywhere. “I could be sitting anywhere and treating patients not just in Raichur, but also in Tanzania,” she asserted.
The need for access to healthcare in India has gone up phenomenally with the advent of chronic diseases in the population. The country accounts for 60 percent of the world’s heart disease patients, according to data released last year by the World Health Organization, and is home to 35 million diabetics, the largest number on the globe.
Cancer is also on the rise with almost 400,000 people in India dying each year from various types of the disease. The overall oncology market is growing at about 20 percent per annum, Pradeep Jaisingh, founder and CEO of New Delhi-based International Oncology, told India-West in June.
Gupta stated that the Indian government has shown its commitment to telemedicine, promising to increase funding to public health care.
And in September, Sachin Pilot, India’s young Minister of Communications and Information Technology, unveiled a plan that would lay out 500,000 miles of optical fibre throughout the country, bringing high-speed connectivity to every remote area of India within the next two years.
source: http://www.indiawest.com / News> US Indian / by Sunita Sohrabji, Staff Reporter / December 01st, 2011