Apollo In Kohima Telemedicine Project

Apollo Hospitals, as part of its foray into telemedicines, has initiated a pilot project along with Marubeni of Japan and the information and technology ministry to open a centre in Kohima.

Telemedicine refers to the business of transmitting diagnostic reports of patients using the telecom network to tertiary -- or superspeciality -- healthcare centres where doctors can verify them and transmit their diagnosis back without having to physically meet the patients.

Apollo has already forayed into the east by opening two telemedicine centres in Kolkata and Guwahati, and a tertiary care hospital in Bilaspur.

"The new centres are more information-centric while in Bilaspur, it is a tertiary care hospital. This brings our total of telemedicine centres to 11," Sangita Reddy, director Apollo Hospitals Enterprise said.

The others are at Chennai, Hyderabad, Madurai, Vishakhapatnam, Aragonda (its pilot village for telemedicines), Kolkata, Guwahati and Bilaspur.

The company had started its telemedicine project with a target of 15 centres by March 2002. Apollo has 8 detailed centres at present.

It has also successfully connected over 2,500 doctors outside the Apollo framework with internet access in order to make them more easily accessible. These are currently participating in offering a second opinion for patients.

Its pilot project, Aragonda, with a population of 15,000 is connected with Apollo hospitals in Chennai and Hyderabad. The healthcare company has also set up a primary health care centre in the village.

Apollo wants to eventually connect 2,600 primary care centres, 500 secondary care centres and 100 tertiary centres are part of its telemedicine network. "Our hospitals in Tanzania and Sri Lanka will also get connected soon into our network," Reddy said.