Virtual OPD: Now a Reality

Its been over two decade, since the telemedicine concept hit India. This
unique concept aims to provide healthcare and medical facilities to people
living in rural areas and places using telecommunication technology.

However, technical limitations and infrastructural needs involving
investments have prevented it from reaching out to the target group and help the
rural folks to reap its benefits.

According to Samir Syed, director, sales, Avaya Global Connect, lack of
scalability, limited coverage and inability to share infrastructure across
multiple locations are three key hurdles against telemedicine.

Its not scalable as it offers one-to-one session, where at one end is the
remote telemedicine center, and at the other end are the centrally-located
hospitals in cities from where doctors examine the patients, says Syed.

Further he explains that theres limited coverage in terms of utilizing the
pool of doctors or specialists and the infrastructure remains unshared to
multiple locations because of centralized system.

It was after studying these challenges and brainstorming on the ways to
overcome them that the concept of Virtual outdoor patient departmentan
innovative solution to provide healthcare facilities for people in remote
locations, evolved.

This solution virtually simulates the OPD of hospitals using the power of
Internet, unified communications (UC) technology and video contact center
application along with the telemedicine solution.

Virtual OPD is highly scalable with many-to-many sessions. This means many
patients from different locations can simultaneously access doctors or
specialists across locations.

A number of doctors and specialists can provide their services easily and
have better reach to large number of patients as the infrastructure is
non-centralized compared to telemedicine.

With virtual OPD, any patient from remote area can go to the healthcare
center, where he/she can request for a doctor related to his health problem. And
this request is then visible on web application where the respective doctors can
login the session using webcam and start examining the patient.

Since it integrates the telemedicine application, all the health records and
patients history is available to doctors. Also, the doctors are not required to
sit in the hospital or centralized location as done in telemedicine.

Medical professionals can have access to applications and provide services
sitting from their homes or private clinic using a broadband connection, laptop
or computer attached with webcam, Syed explains.

Importantly, Syed says that since many doctors can get online during the
sessions, if a patient takes more times with a doctor, then the second patients
request which is in queue is routed to another doctor using the video contact
center program. Hence, the application tries to utilize the pool of available
doctors and provide services to more patients.

According to Syed, the solution is modular and scalable and says that the
company offers it at operational costs to hospitals and healthcare centers.
They are not required to make any upfront or capital investment for the virtual
OPD solution. Hence it can serve the masses with healthcare facilities, he
concludes.

Pankaj Maru/CIOL

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