The Union Health Ministry’s telemedicine service platform ”eSanjeevani” has completed three lakh tele-consultations till now, the government said on Tuesday. The platform supports two types of telemedicine services — doctor-to-doctor through eSanjeevani and patient-to-doctor through eSanjeevani OPD. It has provided essential healthcare at a critical time when conventional medicine is perceived to be risky owing to the nature of the coronavirus disease, the health ministry said. On August 9, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan had described as “landmark achievement”, the national telemedicine service completing over 1.5 lakh teleconsultations. The platform reached double that number within a month since then. One lakh of these tele-consultations were held in the last 20 days, the ministry said. The Doctor-to-Doctor eSanjeevani service is an important pillar of the Ayushman Bharat Health and Wellness Centre (AB-HWCs) programme, it said. Launched in November last year, it aims to implement tele-consultation in all the 1.5 lakh health and wellness centres in a ”hub and spoke” model by December 2022, the ministry said. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the health ministry rolled out the second tele-consultation service — ”eSanjeevaniOPD” — enabling patient-to-doctor teleconsultation on April 13 this year . This has proved to be a boon in containing the spread of coronavirus infection while simultaneously enabling provisions for non-COVID essential healthcare, it said. ESanjeevani has been implemented by 23 states so far and others are in the process of rolling it out, the ministry said, adding that Tamil Nadu alone has contributed 97,204 consultations on the eSanjeevaniOPD app while Uttar Pradesh is in second position with 65,173 total consultations. Considering the uptake of eSanjeevani by the populace in the states and UTs, tertiary-level institutions like Lady Hardinge Medical College and associated hospitals, AIIMS Bathinda, AIIMS Bibinagar, AIIMS Rishikesh have also on-boarded eSanjeevani, it said.
