Opinion Vision statement

A set of technicians and government ophthalmologists from the backward northern districts of Karnataka are now being trained. The entire project is set to become the very first private-public partnership to prevent infant blindness in India. “Tele-ophthalmology and,more generally,tele-medicine,has the potential to make remote diagnosis affordable and effective,” says Dr Vinekar. Consequently,in countries like India,tele-medicine could spawn a workable healthcare model that could help in early detection and prevention of disease. Meanwhile,governments in Ghana,Thailand and Sri Lanka have expressed interest in launching similar projects.

“A convergence of portable,low-power and well-connected medical devices will drive networked healthcare and virtual doctor concepts,” says Sham Banerji,CEO of i2i Telesolutions,which provided the back-end software for Vinekar’s tele-ophthalmology project. Banerji who recently quit as head of Texas Instruments’ Indian software division to start up the tele-medicine software firm,predicts that for many under-served and under-developed markets in the future,a patient’s first encounter with healthcare could well be via a broadband network.

Take Dr Vinekar’s tele-ophthalmology project. The screening and treatment apparatus goes round the southern districts of Karnataka five days a week with a technician,a project manager and a driver. The team visits 18 sites — district hospitals,medical college hospitals and private neo-natal ICUs — where premature newborns (less than 35 weeks old and less than 2,000 gms birthweight) are kept. Trained technicians take pictures of the retinas of premature babies and transmit them over broadband networks to pediatric eye surgeons. A surgeon armed with an iPhone could be sitting practically anywhere in the world. The ophthalmologist can enlarge the scans using the phone graphics capabilities. In a few minutes the expert determines whether the baby has ROP and needs immediate treatment. Timing is critical because the window of treatment is an extremely small one extending to hours rather than days or weeks.

One in two premature babies in India suffers from ROP where blood vessels of the retina are immaturely grown. Dr Vinekar refers to the condition as “a tsunami of a disease” that comes and goes within the third to eighth week of a premature baby’s life.

This is merely the tip of the iceberg as far as the potential of tele-medicine goes. By merely looking at the eye scans,Dr Vinekar and his team have detected other conditions such as hole in the heart and ocular cancer in babies. As in the case of Dr Vinekar’s project,socially relevant research could marry technology to set off a healthcare revolution. Tele-medicine could fell the separating barrier between poor patients and healthcare.

saritha.rai@expressindia.com