TELEHEALTH  Delivering Health to Rural Masses of Kerala 

Telehealth Kerala                                                                                    +         Indian Institute of Inforamtion Technology

and Management, Kerala

Park Centre Technopark

Trivandrum-695 581

Telephone:+91-471-2700777,2527567

This is a Project funded by Department of Information Technology, Government of India and Government of Kerala. This project is an initiative to link all the Medical Colleges in Kerala to provide tertiary care to all the rural population through its health centres.

 

Telehealth, is the use of communications and information technologies to overcome geographic distances between health care practitioners or between practitioners and service users for the purposes of diagnosis treatment, consultation, education and health information transfer (Pong and Hogenbirk ).

 

Mission
Making the Healthcare accessible and affordable for the rural masses of Kerala using Information and Communication Technologies by preventing and controlling diseases by creating awareness and delivering services.

 

Objectives

• Delivering Healthcare in the remote Healthcentres using ICT
• Making the Healthcare affordable for the rural masses using ICT
• Creating awareness on the healthcare related activities for prevention of communicable and non-communicable diseases
• Providing consultations at the rural healthcentres using ICT

 

Specific objectives

• To educate the common masses of Kerala on healthcare using ICT
• Using ICT to provide treatments and consultations for the rural masses
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• .

 

 

• To empower the physicians posted in Rural Kerala by facilitating regular interaction with the specialists using ICT

 

 

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• To generate the digital data base for the Patients

 of Kerala

 

• To minimise the expenditure incurred on travel to tertiary hospitals-Medical Colleges for treatment by the patients from their villages

 

• Using ICT at Rural Health Centres t 

o follow-up the rural patients who are already treated at tertiary hospitals

• To prepare the referred patients for the specialised treatments and surgeries

 

 

• To reduce the crowd in tertiary care hospitals

 

• To provide medical education and continuing education to the Doctors posted in the Rural Health Centres

 

 

 

 

Features of Telehealth

·         Teleconsultation

• Counseling
• Prevention of diseases by using ICT as an IEC media
• Online Medical Education
• Medical Resource Centre
• Repository of information on the specialists and hospitals
• Drug Database
• Monitoring the patients
• Digital Medical Records
• Networking the rural physicians and the specialists

Framework

Telehealth links Medical Colleges in the Cities to remote PHCs /SHCs, Patients and the Technology. Networking of these facilitates Telehealth by contributing their potential inputs for optimum benefits. This will in turn improves the quality of healthcare. The specialised tertiary care centres are called as Tele-Referral Centres(TRCs) and they are linking to Remote Teleconsultation Centres(RTCs). The TRCs and RTCs were networked either using VSAT or ISDN networks for Teleconsultation and Medical Education. ( figure 1).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

©iiitmk

 

 

 

Benefits of Telehealth

• Availability of specialised care in the rural healthcentres throughout Kerala.
• Reduction in cost of specialized healthcare for Rural Masses
• Empowerment of physicians posted at rural healthcentres
• Minimizing the efforts of follow-up of patients by providing similar services using ICT from the same set of specialists
• Minimize the number of days of stay at the tertiary hospitals by preparing the patients for specialised treatment and surgery beforehand with the advice received using ICT
• Updating the knowledge of rural physicians using ICT through regular interaction with the specialists and CMEs

 

 

+Contact: Dr.K.Srinivasan, Project Coordinator, Telehealth, IIITMK,  ksrini@iiitmk.ac.in, Telehealth Kerala