Chennai has put India on the global health care map

IF there are two fields in which Chennai has emerged as the leader, they are health care and the automobile sector. Be it in neurosurgery, telemedicine, ophthalmology, liver transplantation, orthopaedics, cardiac surgery, keyhole surgeries in shoulder, elbow and wrist, cranio-facial surgery and diabetes treatment, private and government hospitals provide quality care. Sankara Nethralaya, Apollo Hospitals, MIOT Hospitals, Sri Ramachandra Medical Centre and Global Hospitals and Health City draw patients from Orissa, West Bengal and the north-eastern States.

Dr K. Ganapathy, neurosurgeon and president, Apollo Telemedicine Network Foundation (ATNF), is certain that Chennai is the medical capital of India. “Definitely yes,” he said. “We are also the telemedicine capital of India. Apollo Hospitals, Sankara Nethralaya, Aravind Eye Hospitals and other private hospitals in Tamil Nadu account for more than 75 per cent of the telemedicine consultations in India. Apollo Hospitals has the largest and the oldest multi-speciality network in South Asia.” With more than 9,000 beds across 54 hospitals in India and abroad and about 4,000 consultants, the Apollo Hospitals group, which had its genesis in Chennai, is one of the world's largest hospital groups.

“We were the first in the world to start VSAT-enabled telemedicine services to villages,” Dr Ganapathy said. The world's first VSAT-enabled secondary care hospital was commissioned on March 24, 2000, at Aragonda village in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh by the then President of the United States, Bill Clinton. Dr Prathap C. Reddy, founder of Apollo Hospitals, is from Aragonda. The ATNF has done 70,000 telemedicine consultations in the past 11 years in 25 different disciplines to patients who were 200 km to 7,500 km away. The ATNF has 125 peripheral centres, including 115 in India and 10 overseas, including in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Maldives, Mauritius, Muscat and Nigeria.

On August 9, as Dr Nithya Narayanan, an ENT surgeon, sat in the telemedicine room of the ATNF in Chennai, a patient from the peripheral centre in Port Blair appeared on the monitor before her. Dr Nithya had already received the details of his problem through a faxed message. He was suffering from hearing loss and had been told to undergo a surgery. Now, he wanted to know how much the surgery would cost and how long he would have to stay in Chennai.

“We are convinced now that we can transform health care by using technology,” said Dr Ganapathy. The ATNF has initiated a new concept in telemedince by facilitating telemedicine consultations wherever the consultant is present. The patient can contact him through the Internet, from any personal computer where a dedicated software is available. According to Dr Ganapathy, Chennai has 200 per cent tele-density with 10 million mobile phones in use while its population is about five million. Eighty-six per cent of the people living in rural Tamil Nadu have mobile telephones. “We can use technology, including mobile phones, to provide health care. We can do tele-camps, tele-screening, and so on,” he said.