Govt, Apollo Hospitals partner for telemedicine services

The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology will launch telemedicine services in collaboration with the Apollo Hospitals on August 25, under which people can consult doctors through video link and also order generic drugs online.

"Under the service, people can visit Common Service Centres (CSC) and fix an appointment for seeking expert consultancy with a doctor. The doctors at Apollo Hospitals will be able to provide consultancy to the patients using the video link facilities", a Ministry official said.

The Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) has a network of 1.5 lakh CSCs across the country and Apollo Hospitals will provide the services using the network.

To begin with, the services will be launched in 60,000 CSCs across the country. The initiative will benefit the patients in remote areas of the country where there is acute shortage of doctors.

Further, the Ministry of Health will extend the benefit of their Jan Aushadhi programme of delivery of generic drugs through the CSC network.

"The CSC and Bureau of Pharma PSU of India (BPPI) will sign an MoU for providing these generic drugs to citizens thorugh CSC network," he added.