Telemedicine: 15 more districts covered

CUTTACK: The State Government on Saturday rolled out the Orissa Telemedicine Network (OTN) Phase III connecting 15 district headquarters hospitals (DHHs) with the three medical college and hospitals (MCHs).  The inclusion of the districts unveils a new era in health services delivery system in the State as people of backward and remote areas would be spared of the travails and troubles of having to run to the referral hospitals as they would get speciality consultations through video conferencing right at the DHH of their own region. They would be provided treatment advise and procedures and will not have to go to the MCHs unless extremely necessary. With the inclusion of the 15 districts, the total number of DHHs networked under telemedicine has gone up to 21. Six more districts __ Malkangiri, Boudh, Gajapati, Sundargarh, Nuapada and Deogarh __ are in the process of being linked while Nabarangpur would be brought under the fold after the Umerkote bypolls. All the DHHs in the State, barring Nabarangpur, would be covered by next week. The delay has been on account of some technical hiccups in making the bandwidth operational by the BSNL. Health Minister Prasanna Acharya launched the service at Telemedicine Nodal Centre at SCB Medical here. As the OTN went live, patients at DHHs of Sonepur, Bargarh, Kendrapara, Jajpur and Kandhamal availed tele-consultations from experts of the SCB while tele-followup process was held between the latter and the SGPGIMS, Lucknow. The ` 5.08-crore project has been funded by NRHM and implemented by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune.  The next step would be establishing tele-mentoring system which would enable surgeries under the guidance of experts of premier medical institutions through video conferencing and live two-way transmissions. An e-Health Hub or advanced Central Telemedicine Complex is being established for the purpose. The three-storey building to house the service is expected to be completed by April next year.  The complex would have main servers and  depositories along with the Central Telemedicine Node. The operation theatres in the surgical departments would be linked through the node to  enable tele-mentoring, Nodal Officer Prof B N Mohanty said. Among others, Health Secretary Anu Garg and senior director of C-DAC, Pune, Dr P K Sinha were present.