>>
expert speak
eHEALTH 50th Issue Special
Satellite Technology Bridging the Health Divide With satellite communication technology, telemedicine provides access to quality healthcare, even to the farthest reaches of the nation By Ramachandran Viswanathan
T
housands of women die every day due to complications during child birth in the villages and small towns of India. The reasons are dependence on local midwives, who cannot tackle any complication during childbirth, and absence of good and accessible healthcare. Similarly a large number of people die every year due to some or the other complication or in the absence of correct diagnosis. In India of the 21st century, providing universal access to good and affordable healthcare is the biggest challenge. The government reiterates this whenever the issue of challenges before the public healthcare system is raised. Though there have been some improvements; child survival, maternal mortality and communicable diseases still constitute 38 percent of deaths, while non-communicable diseases account for 42 percent of all deaths. More startling is the data that one-third of global cases of filaria are in India, half of the world’s leprosy cases are found in India and every year more than 300 million episodes of acute diarrhea occur every year in India in children below five years of age.
Gaps to fill Public healthcare is the responsibility of state governments and has three facets: primary healthcare at the village level, district level health centers and medical colleges, and at the city level public and private hospitals.
48
Telemedicine has been recognised as an area that can solve many of the country’s health problems, by the Government of India In rural or semi-urban areas the situation is worse in the absence of buildings, refusal of doctors to live and work in areas far removed from cities and the unavailability of trained staff and medicines. For the last three decades efforts are on to ensure that every primary health centre at least has a building. Unfortunately, even today many primary healthcare centers don’t even have buildings. If there is a structure, there is no
> www.ehealthonline.org > January 2011
medical staff to man them, or there is lack of availability of life-saving drugs.
Communication technology goes the distance This is where technology can provide an answer. And to some extent a small beginning has been made by institutes like the Sanjay Gandhi PGI in Lucknow or by individuals like Dr Devi Shetty at Narayana