Soma Das in the Indian Financial Express, gets excited about the potential for 3G to deliver invaluable health advice:
A pre-paid card to recovery: pay and consult docs over phone
With the 3G telephony era set to dawn by the middle of next year it will be much more than just astro gurus and film stars on your mobile phone. You can soon visit and pay your doctors over phone. In a service, soft launched by a mobile value added services company, Oxigen Services, a patient can make a call to the doctor through a pre-paid card and avail of the doctor s consultancy over mobile phone. From a survey, we found that 40 to 50% of doctor visits that materialise don t need a face to face consultation and physical examination and most such visits last less than about five minutes. These are mostly true of the follow-up services. But patients end up incurring substantial cost and time in traveling to the hospitals and nursing homes for the lack of any other alternatives, said Pramod Saxena, chairman and managing director, Oxigen Services.
Doctors will have the discretion to quote their consultancy fees and a list of available doctors, region-wise along with their fees will be put up on a dedicated website of Oxigen. The customer, who has bought an Oxycash wallet or the pre-paid card, can then choose from that list of registered doctors and make a call, based on his personal relation with the doctor, his history or the doctors reputation, added Saxena.
The company is currently in talks with various medical forums and associations of doctors with a marketing strategy of getting the service endorsed by the doctors first and then get it recommended to patients. It also plans to approach hospital management and chalk out a deal with them subsequently.
While the charges to the patient will depend on the doctor he chooses to call, the doctors will be paid a fixed fee, over and above which they will be paid on the basis of minutes clocked during all the calls they attend to periodically. Saxena expects the charges to be lower than prevailing average consultancy charges, since it gives doctors also the benefit of offering services at their own convenient time and space. Currently doctors can voluntarily register to offer services free of cost. And Oxigen will be entitled to less than 6% of the total transaction cost.
However, the Indian Medical Association spokesperson Dr Narender Saini said he is not aware whether the service provider has got in touch with IMA, but in his independent capacity he feels it can only work in case of patients who have been physically examined at least once. We work on the principle of Please clinically correlate , so the idea of just advising the patient without seeing him even once doesn t sound feasible to me personally, said Saini. The service could spark off a larger debate on absence of human touch in medical services however simultaneously improving accessibility to doctors.
Oxigen plans to empanel both general medicine practitioners and specialists on its list and classify them into categories. It further plans to extend the facility of conference calls where more than one doctor can be consulted. If a patient is availing a specialist s service on Oxigen and wants his family physicians on line to be part of consultation process, we can offer that service too, said Saxena.
Operating on a slightly different BPO model of telemedicine is the highly successful and internationally acclaimed example of GrameenPhone Ltd (GP) in Bangladesh which launched HealthLine in cooperation with Telemedicine Reference Centre Limited in 2006. The HealthLine Service is a 24-hour Medical Call Centre manned by licensed physicians and accessible to all GrameenPhone subscribers and is addressing the dismal doctor patient ratio of 1:4000. According to industry watchers telecom service providers are also working on various such telemedicine services, mainly to address the rural areas.
Whilst the Talk to a Doctor concept seems a little embryonic it is fantastic that the India mobile market is so forward thinking that it can see the potential for 3G – even though the country’s first commercial 3G network went live only a few weeks ago.
UPDATE: Khomba Singh at the India Economic Times gives a little more detail on the proposed “Doctor Talk” service; “Don’t worry, the doctor is just a call away now”
It appears that Oxigen, the mobile content company who are proposing to launch the service, has a rather perculiar take on the concept of patient privacy: “One of the reasons why doctors avoid phone consultations is because it infringes on their privacy not to mention the loss of consultation fees. In most cases, hospitals also do not allow medical consultation over the phone. The new service will protect the privacy of doctors as their numbers will not be disclosed to patients and the call consultations will be limited to a specified time”.