Healthcare is one of the largest service sectors in India as it should be, considering the population of India. Both the public sector and the private sector play a very active role. Government hospitals provide medical facilities at very low cost to everyone where as private hospital charges higher than the government.

With the rapid growth of population and shortage of medical facilities provided by the government, many private health care services came onto the scene. But according to World Bank, nearly 27crore people come under poverty line in India. So, definitely these people will prefer government hospitals.

Problem faced by government hospitals:

Since the major population prefer government hospital, it automatically creates a huge queue outside every department and the imbalance between doctors and patients rises. Since the pressure on doctors is less in the private sector and as the pay scale is higher; government doctors tend to move to the private sector. At last the problems knock at government hospitals door due to the lack of staff and doctors, especially in the emergency situations when the immediate support of doctors is needed.

Even after having imaging technology, if the diagnoses are not done by radiologist. A proper medical decision cannot be made for better medical treatment by the clinician. We are facing a large shortage of radiologists especially in government hospitals. Satisfaction level of the patient was not found to be high with respect to the treatment and report generation.

Need for Solution: Tele-radiology

Tele-radiology: Tele-radiology is the transmission of radiological patient images, for example, x-ray, CTs, and MRIs, from one distinct location to the next for the reason of distributing studies to different radiologists and doctors.

Tele-radiology took birth somewhat because of the unevenness between the request and availability of radiologist. The ultimate solution which we can provide to those hospitals, patients, diagnosis centres, radiologist and clinician is only through Tele-radiology.

e-Kirana is such a technology solution whose services are currently spread across 12 district hospitals in Karnataka, 5C or 5Clique is collaborated with government of Karnataka and many other organisations to bring a better outcome in healthcare; they helped to set up facility like e-Kirana to connect government hospitals across Karnataka to the Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute (BMCRI) to enable immediate reading of scanned images.

TELE-RADIOLOGY HAS POTENTIAL AS A BUSINESS MODEL AND ALSO FOR HEALTHY INDIA.

India’s Health:

“The country is facing a shortage of allied health professionals. Demands for well qualified and skilled allied health workforce in the country are increasing every day due to advances in healthcare sector, diagnostic procedures, diagnostic and therapeutic equipment, etc” said a senior ministry official.

In March 2017, the Union Cabinet approved National Health Policy 2017. They aim to allocate major resources to primary care (day to day health care given by health care provider). In addition to this, the policy also proposes free drugs, free diagnostics and free emergency and essential health care service in all government hospitals to provide access and financial protection to a majority of the population.

It also proposes the raising of public health spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP where as it was 1 per cent of GDP earlier. According to health minister, the target expenditure of 2.5 per cent of GDP will be met by 2025.

As Prime Minister puts it “The National Health policy marks a historic moment in our endeavour to create a healthy India where everyone has access to quality healthcare.”