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The Ministries of Electronics and IT (MeitY), Telecommunications and Health & Family Welfare will come together for a ‘connectivity for health’ project.
“The aim is to connect all rural areas with government hospitals so that they have access to well- known doctors through video calling,” a senior government official told BusinessLine . This will be done through a special broadband line, to provide telemedicine in rural areas, the official said. A meeting was held between Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Electronics & IT and Law & Justice, and JP Nadda, Minister of Health and Family Welfare on the project, said officials.
‘Bylane first’
Secretaries of both the Ministries (MeitY and Health Ministry) were also present, and had given their suggestions too, said another source privy to the meeting. They have suggested that for broadband connectivity, instead of depending only on BSNL and RailTel, companies such as Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio should also be allowed to participate, because of their current rural penetration facilities.
“Let’s start the bylane first, and once the highway is built, everyone can use it,” said Prasad.
The government is already running various programmes as part of the ‘Digital India’ initiative, such as e-Hospital — an open-source health information management system, which is configurable and easily customisable with multi-tenancy support.
Recently, MeitY and the Health Ministry also tied up to implement the Ayushman Bharat scheme through three-lakh Common Service Centres (CSCs) across the country.
Ayushman Bharat is the National Health Protection Scheme, which will cover over 10 crore poor families (around 50 crore beneficiaries) providing coverage of up to ₹5 lakh (per family per year) for secondary and tertiary-care hospitalisation.
As per the agreement, a beneficiary can now visit the nearby CSC to get the benefit of this scheme. CSC will help the beneficiary identify his/her name in the Health Ministry database and his/her entitlement for the scheme.
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