Maximum Social Impact-Tele-education/medicine-AIIMS

Sunday, June 17, 2007

India still lacks proper health care in remote locations. That’s why patients mostly have to come to the metros for treatment. For patients with serious ailments, this can become a serious limitation. Till now they  didn’t really have a choice but to travel, but AIIMS is trying to change all that through its Tele-Medicine project. This project was initiated by the Government of India to provide training, consultancy and expert opinions from AIIMS

to patients and hospitals all over India via teleconferencing. All excited by the impact of the project, we went to check it out. The facility is located in the AIIMs campus. As the AIIMs campus is really big, we had to wander around for about an hour to reach the Tele-Medicine Center, despite having the directions (and in between, we took a wrong turn and landed right in front of the AIIMs mortuary!). As we entered the telemedicine room, we found an undersized cabin with one person seated in front of a PC to with a webcam attached. “Was this the teleconferencing setup we had come all the way for?’ we wondered. Thankfully, our doubts were put to bay when we were told that Dr. Tyagi would be reaching shortly to take us into the Tele-Medicine room. Finally, as the door opened, we were stunned to see a huge room, complete with a large plasma screen and computers for managing the hi-tech video conferencing infrastructure.

	He is head of the Computer Facility at the Institute. He got his education at the University of Delhi and obtained the post-graduate degree in Many-Body Theories in Particle/Quantum Physics. He joined the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in August 1972.
Dr R S Tyagi, Ph D, Dy Director (Computers) , AIIMS	"The project was divided in 15 lectures to be imparted. Laboratories were setup on both sides and hands on training was conducted on dummies."

The project connects 300 locations (institutions and peripheral medical colleges) all over India, with VSAT or ISDN links. Tele-consultation is conducted whenever required—for instance, if specialists are unavailable in remote locations or an institution needs a second opinion from AIIMS on some critical case. Then, experts from AIIMS assemble in the telemedicine section and live consultation is held between two or more locations.

The system is currently used mainly for medical education, in order to train the existing manpower and empower them with the knowledge to handle the specialty care in Urology, Cardiology, Childcare, and other departments. In order to do that, experts at AIIMS connect to all the major medical institutes and perform live lab demos in specific medical areas.

The students in remote locations also perform the same exercise as shown by AIIMS professors and the professors mentor and guide them. Being a two way audio/video conference, students can ask all the questions they want.

The system also offers facility for showing digital diagnostic reports of the patients in real time in the teleconferencing session, so that experts from AIIMS can diagnose the patients remotely.

In this system, they have used a classroom required to deliver a lecture and a camera to capture and transmit it to the remote site. The sessions were interactive. A PC and a 51” plasma screen are used for teleconferencing on both sides. Connectivity to this entire system is provided by ISRO for satellite communication and ISRO, MTNL and VSNL for the ISDN channels. As far as performance is concerned, it is seamless without any latency. In a nutshell, the project’s impact is that now patients from all over India don’t need to come to AIIMS for treatment; they can get it at their local medical center.

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