Need to increase the reach of govt’s eSanjeevani program: Lav Agarwal

New Delhi: Private healthcare application architects should come forward to suggest ways that can help increase the reach of e-Sanjeevani application, said Lav Agarwal, IAS, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare while speaking recently at the Virtual-Conference ‘The Fourth Dimension – Deciphering Telehealth’ organized by NASSCOM CoE for IoT/AI under its Healthcare initiative LHIF. Currently, the application is being used by 24 states and the government is aiming to increase the reach of the government app which has been able to garner an encouraging response during the current pandemic.

Launched in November 2019, e-Sanjeevani is built meeting all the provisions of the EHR-2016 standards laid out by the ministry. Telemedicine is also being offered to overseas, especially African countries, through the ministry of external affairs. Any Telemedicine platform needs a robust architecture and infrastructure to handle vast number of calls, which the Government is committed to addressing soon. Mr Lav Agarwal added “While addressing COVID-19 situation as a threat, Government has also taken it as an opportunistic situation to quickly release the telemedicine guidelines and following up with issuing a gazette notification, in a record time. This helped us to formally release the e-Sanjeevani OPD application free of cost to the entire population of India.”

e-Sanjeevani was developed by the Mohali branch of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), an attached office of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Talking further, he said, “we are strengthening the application by making all the centres to start using this application and right now 24 states are using this application. Indian Government is the biggest tele-medicine provider in the world today. To make this application more robust, we need the industry and startups to come with good ideas to enhance it capabilities, through point of care diagnostics (using IOT) for quick data capture and AI based chat-bots that can help the consumer with Clinical Decision Systems (CDS)”.

Mr Lav Agarwal emphasized the need for public private partnership (PPP) for the success of Digital Health Initiatives under National Digital Health Mission. As per him “India is the first country to start thinking about the Integrated Approach at a grand scale for institutionalizing Digital Health across India, which is truly un-paralleled”.