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HEALTH-TN-SPACE

Space Hospitals launches Satellite Medical Centre
Vellore, Tamil Nadu, Sep 11 (UNI)

The Chennai-based Space Hospitals launched its first Satellite Medical Centre at Sankari Hospital here yesterday.  In his address, Hospital CEO Sanjay Bharatwaj claimed this was the first-of-its kind initiative in North Tamil Nadu for providing advanced healthcare support to rural areas using electronic
information and communication technologies.

            Space Hospitals was the 'first to work across multiple hospitals to connect rural Indians to specialist doctors in urban centres.' The project used advanced communication technologies such as satellite internet and video-conferencing to connect rural medical facilities with the best specialists available.

       It addressed the problem of high costs, travel time and emotional trauma associated with receiving care in the rural areas as 80 percent of all medical professionals were based in urban areas.

      Patients in hinterland often had to travel hundreds of miles and incur prohibitive costs to receive any form of expert opinion for complex medical situations such as heart problems, or cancer.  The launch of telemedicine could save rural Indians time, money and stress associated with such situations.

   Studies showed up to 50 per cent of the deaths in rural medical facilities were exacerbated by the lack of specialists for treatment and the resulting delay in care.

   In the model provided by telemedicine, a doctor in a rural area could share medical information with a specialist in order to improve the accuracy of the diagnosis.  Anything from ECG results to X-rays could be shared with leading
doctors in the field in real time.

   The costs had been subsidised for the launch and were on par with
the prices rural Indians already paid for real-time care.  ''And when it comes to the need for certain specialist diagnosis, our process could save people a lot of money,'' Dr Bharatwaj added. In his address, Vellore MLA C Gnanasekaran hailed the efforts of Space Hospitals and the Sankari Hospital and hoped the facility would help rural patients in and around Vellore to a larger extent.