By Our Reporter
SHILLONG: Apollo Hospitals, the leading super-speciality hospital group in the country is keen to partner with the State Government to introduce tele health services in the State besides opening up more telemedicine centres in the North East.
Tele health is the delivery of health-related services and information via telecommunications technologies.
“We have few telemedicine centres in the North East in Assam at Guwahati, Dibrugarh and Silchar besides Mizoram. We get lot of patients from this region and Apollo Hospital is keen to open more tele medicine centres as long as we have internet connectivity and we are interested to partner with anybody,” Dr K Ganapathy MS (Neuro) and president of Apollo Telemedicine Networking Foundation and Telemedicine Society of India said here on Thursday.
Dr Ganapathy was in the city for a presentation on the topic “Transforming Health Care with Information and Communication Technology” at St Anthony’s College auditorium during the two-day Meghalaya IT Summit titled ‘Meghabytes 2011’ being organised by the Department of Information and Technology and Meghalaya Information Technology Society.
“We are happy to collaborate with the government under public private partnership to put up telemedicine centres so that we can find answer to problems being faced by the people from this region,” Dr Ganapathy said.
“Incidents of complication could be reduced if tests are done at younger age and tele health can help customers from being bankrupt. 80 per cent of health related inquiries can be done through the system and 95 per cent problems could be solved through tele medicine,” Dr Ganapathy told the gathering.
Commissioner and Secretary (IT and Health) Donald Phillips Wahlang said introduction of tele health was very much feasible in the State.
“The State Government will explore the possibility to tie up with Apollo and within the next 10 to 15 days, we will develop our business plan on how to go about with the proposed project,” Wahlang said on the sideline of the Summit.
According to Wahlang, civil hospitals in various districts of the State would be the first set of target for implementing the project.
Wahlang informed that a team from Apollo to be led by Dr Ganapathy would be invited to give their presentation on the project before the government takes any call and finalise the nitty-gritty of it.