Telemedicine in Covid-19: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

The pandemic of COVID -19 is a healthcare emergency of International concern. It originated in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and was declared as pandemic by WHO on 12 March 2020. Since then it is raging relentlessly across the world with staggering more than 60 lakh cases in India currently. This has put a tremendous strain on already frail and overburdened Indian healthcare system and aggravated concern in the accessibility to healthcare by common mass due to prevailing lockdown conditions. This has sparkled to re-think and renew the policy on healthcare and focus on relevance, reach and utilize the potential of telemedicine services for the delivery of healthcare to community. This term telemedicine has been in use since 1970s but became fully operational globally in early 2000. Now about 20 years later we find a revolutionary change in the focus of health services delivery towards community healthcare and wellbeing In this article we aim to analyze the difficulties and hurdles faced by non COVID patients and challenges in front of the government to dispense basic healthcare to those in need. We need to tap all our resources particularly ICT for healthcare delivery and use this adversity of COVID 19 pandemic as an opportunity to build on our capacity and expertise in the area of Telemedicine for the betterment of community healthcare.