How India overcomes the 'storm' of Covid-19 infections 2
In April, when the number of infections soared in the second wave of Covid-19, causing almost all hospitals in India to be overwhelmed, Mallik Manem could not go directly to a doctor in Hyderabad to ask about his care.
Being a doctor himself and suffering from Covid-19, Manem, 55 years old, understands the pressure his colleagues are under.
A Covid-19 patient treatment room at a hospital in New Delhi, India, in May. Photo: Reuters.
Manem can contact four doctors in the US at the same time via video chat.
The importance of telemedicine has increased significantly in many countries since the outbreak of the pandemic.
In developing countries with outdated health systems, and especially in India during the Covid-19 `storm` in the spring, remote medical examination is a lifesaver, experts say.
According to Vikram Kapur, leader of management consulting firm Bain & Co., currently in charge of healthcare in the Asia-Pacific region, telemedicine has almost replaced on-site care for many cases.
There is no national data on telemedicine in India, but Kapur estimates that the number of online medical consultations during the most intense Covid-19 outbreak has increased four to five times compared to before the epidemic.
According to consulting and research firm Grand View Research, the online healthcare market is expected to grow to nearly $300 billion by 2028, from $56 billion last year.
Many countries are making telemedicine a permanent option in their plans to fight new waves of Covid-19.
In India, some states are also including telemedicine in their plans to respond to the risk of future Covid-19 outbreaks.
`It’s clear that the pandemic has made telemedicine more widely accepted globally,` said Sreeni Gangasani, an Atlanta-based cardiologist and co-founder of eGlobalDoctors, a platform that connects patients and doctors around the world.
When Covid-19 cases exploded in India in the spring, eGlobalDoctors was months away from launching.
From the beginning of May until now, more than 250 doctors from the UK, the US and other distant countries have volunteered to conduct more than 2,500 online consultation sessions on the eGlobalDoctors platform.
Foreign doctors are not licensed to prescribe for patients in India.
A volunteer doctor from the British Indian Doctors Association remotely consults with medical staff at Shrimad Rajchandra hospital in the Indian state of Gujarat.
According to Dr. Gangasani, most of the time, they focus on reassuring scared and anxious patients that the symptoms they are experiencing are normal and not life-threatening.
For Indians living in rural areas without Internet access or smart electronic devices, doctors also agree to consult over the phone, sometimes through a group of volunteers.
Foreign doctors are also called in to advise on the process of setting up emergency treatment areas for Covid-19 patients or how to deal with the sudden increase in hospitalizations.
`If you help one doctor, that doctor will help 10 other patients,` said Dr. Ashish Dhawan in London.
A friend once asked Dr. Dhawan for advice on converting an outpatient clinic in the city of Pune, western India, into a Covid-19 treatment area.
Volunteers from the Association of British Indian Doctors, which has more than 65,000 members, provide remote consultation to young doctors in India every day.
Bijal Mehta, a Mumbai-based doctor who volunteers at Shrimad Rajchandra Hospital in a rural area of Gujarat state, said hiring doctors from Mumbai is difficult because they don’t speak the same dialect as the villagers.
`I will ask to continue this relationship even after Covid-19 has passed because it is really very good,` he emphasized.
