Muktsar, October 25
In an agrarian state like Punjab, where 75 per cent of the population lives in villages and 75 per cent of the doctors are based in urban areas, most villagers do not have access to even basic healthcare facilities.

To these statistics, add the fact that the poor infrastructure of government rural health centres makes it almost impossible to retain doctors in villages, who when posted there feel they are “professionally isolated.”

The Naandi Foundation, one of India’s largest social sector organisations working to alleviate poverty in rural areas, has floated the concept of telemedicine in rural Punjab in collaboration with the state government. And the moving spirit behind the show is Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal, who also revolutionised the lives of ruralites in this area by brining in the highly successful Reverse Osmosis (RO) plants in an attempt to provide clean drinking water.

When the Punjab Governor, SF Rodrigues, formally inaugurates the Electronic Health Point (EHP), set up by the Naandi Foundation, on October 28 at Malhan village in this district, Punjab will be ushering in a new era in the area of healthcare.

As a pilot project, EHPs have been opened in three villages — Doda, Kotbhai and Malhan — of Muktsar distict. They have been successfully running for the past two months and now the Punjab government and the Naandi foundation have planned to set up such EHP centres in other villages in the cancer-stricken Malwa belt of south-west Punjab, giving much-needed respite to poor villagers.

Going by the response the pilot projects have received in these villages, any lingering doubts that sceptics might have had about their successful running should
be dismissed.

Says AS Sukhija, chief administrator of the Adesh Group of Hospitals, Muktsar, “All three EHPs opened so far have tasted success in reaching out to rural patients. EHPs are a product of superior technology including proliferation of fibre optic cables, expanding bandwidth, fall in computer prices and the licensing of private internet users that has proved to be a boon for the ruralites.”

The EHP at Doda village comprises personal computers with personalised medical software connected to a few medical diagnostic instruments such as ECG, X-ray machine and an X-ray scanner for scanning X-ray photos. Through the computers, digitised versions of a patient’s medical images and diagnostic details such blood test samples and X-rays are dispatched to specialist doctors through a satellite-based communication link.

The inputs are then received at the specialist centres at Bathinda where experienced doctors examine the reports, interact with patients through local doctors and then suggest appropriate treatment through video-conferencing.

Rakinder Singh, a medical specialist at Muktsar, said, “Now it has become easier to set up telecommunication infrastructure in the countryside to increase the reach of the limited number of urban specialists rather than to place medical specialists in places which were earlier devoid of such experts. It has been universally acknowledged that India has made massive leaps in Information Technology. We now no longer follow or ride piggy back. We leapfrog.”

Said Manpreet, “I am really excited because of the uniqueness of the project. Actually, my inspiration came from such centres already working with a fair measure of success in Brazil and Philippines where millions of rural people now have access to state-of-the-art medicinal systems.”