The Indian government on Wednesday said that eSanjeevani, its telemedicine service has completed 3 million consultations.

The National Telemedicine Service eSanjeevani was set up by the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare in 2019 and first rolled out in Andhra Pradesh.

The National Telemedicine Services are currently operational in 31 States and Union Territories and daily more than 35 thousand patients across India are using this digital platform to seek health care services.

eSanjeevani comprises of two variants, doctor to doctor (eSanjeevani AB-HWC) telemedicine platform which is based on hub and spoke model and patient to doctor telemedicine platform (eSanjeevaniOPD) which provides outpatient services to the citizens.

eSanjeevaniAB-HWC is being implemented at Health & Wellness Centres under Ayushman Bharat Scheme and will be made operational at 100,000 Health & Wellness Centers across India by December 2022. Ever since it was rolled out over 1000 hubs and around 15,000 spokes have been set up in various States, eSanjeevani AB-HWC has completed about 900,000 consultations.

eSanjeevaniOPD provides digital health services to the citizens via more than 250 online OPDs. About 220 of these online OPDs are specialist OPDs and the rest are general OPDs.

eSanjeevaniOPD was rolled out on the 13th of April 2020 during the very first lockdown in India when all OPD’s were closed and people were finding it difficult to go and consult a doctor. More than 21 lakh patients have been helped via eSanjeevaniOPD.

The Health Informatics group of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Mohali is providing end-to-end technical services and support from designing efficient workflows, development, implementation, managing operations, of eSanjeevani and also training clinicians with minimal disruptions.

The Health Ministry in consultation with the States are working on innovative and high impact services around eSanjeevani and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Mohali is consistently working to enrich eSanjeevani with new and useful features and functionalities in order to help the patients and doctors.

Around 18.15 per cent of the patients on eSanjeevaniOPD are in the age group of up to 18 years and the majority of patients (50.35 per cent) fall between 20 and 40 years, 22.89 per cent patients are between 40 and 60 years of age and around per cent patients are senior citizens. The data shows that female patients (54.66 per cent) are more than male patients on eSanjeevaniOPD.

An iOS version of the eSanjeevaniOPD will soon be available on iOS app store, this is expected to increase the involvement of National Telemedicine Services in India. The government of Jharkhand is setting up a special OPD on eSanjeevaniOPD that could provide co-morbidities e-certificates to people in order to get themselves vaccinated for COVID-19.

In times where most people might find it difficult to step out of their homes to consult a doctor in order to get a treatment. The eSanjeevani services will ease the hassle of stepping out for people who do not have an urgent medical condition and can be treated remotely without the risk of getting infected from COVID-19.