Govt's 'eSanjeevani' records 400,000 doctor-to-patient tele-consultations

The government's eSanjeevani OPD platform has completed four lakh tele-consultations since its launch in April this year amid the coronavirus pandemic, the health ministry said on Saturday.

The top performing states, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, have logged in 1,33,167 and 1,00,124 sessions, respectively.

The other states that have registered highest consultations through eSanjeevani and eSanjeevani OPD platforms are Himachal Pradesh (36,527), Kerala (33,340), Andhra Pradesh (31,034), Uttarakhand (11,526), Gujarat (8,914), Madhya Pradesh (8,904), Karnataka (7,684), and Maharashtra (7,103).

The usage trend shows that there has been a quick uptake of this service in smaller districts like Villupuram in Tamil Nadu, the ministry said.

Over 16,000 consultations have been recorded from Villupuram, which is the topmost district in terms of tele-consultation services availed of by the beneficiaries, the ministry said.

Nationally eSanjeevani platform is being used by 26 states and over 12,000 practitioners of various state government health departments have been on-boarded on eSanjeevani and their services have been sought by people from 510 districts of the country.

The last 1,00,000 consultations have come up in 18 days, whereas the first 1,00,000 consultations had taken around three months, the ministry said in a statement.

The eSanjeevani OPD services have enabled patient-to-doctor telemedicine in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"This has helped in containing the spread of COVID-19 by ensuring physical distancing and has simultaneously enabled provisions for non-COVID essential healthcare," the statement said.

Around 20 per cent patients have sought health services through eSanjeevani more than once.

"The trend is indicative of the fact that this digital platform for delivery of health services remotely has been adopted by both the service providers as well as the users," the statement said.

A few states have been providing health services for 12 hours a day and seven days a week.

Initially, eSanjeevani OPD was rolled out as an online platform for general OPD service, but considering its utility and the uptake by the public, state health departments wished to roll out speciality OPDs as well.

Accordingly, eSanjeevaniOPD was enhanced to support multiple concurrent speciality and super speciality OPDs as well. Today eSanjeevaniOPD is running 196 online OPDs which include 27 general OPDs and 169 speciality and super-speciality OPDs in 24 states.

Premier institutions like AIIMS Bathinda, AIIMS Rishikesh, AIIMS Bibinagar, Lady Hardinge Medical College and Associated Hospitals, Regional Cancer Centre (Thiruvananthapuram), Cochin Cancer Centre (Ernakulam) are also using eSanjeevani platform to provide speciality services to the patients across the states, the ministry said.

The eSanjeevani platform of the Union Health Ministry has been developed by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in Mohali. It was launched on April 13 owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ministry said.