Introduction:
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the government of many countries has announced the lockdown leaving only essential services such as medical shops, hospitals, ration shops, etc. Whilst the medical services are available people are practicing social-distancing in such a manner that they want to avoid hospitals & medical health so as to not get infected. However, as COVID-19 makes the people stay indoors, health consultation has seen a huge surge. In this critical time, the need for offering adequate healthcare has almost crossed its threshold. In a huge country like India, where there are very fewer doctors in accordance with its massive population, the online Pharmacy app and Telehealth app could be the future.
With the rising panic of the COVID-19 in India, technology is being leveraged in every possible manner for eliminating more & more socialization activities. Patients who are suffering from diseases like common cold, cough, and fever, can use Doctor’s on-demand app such as Practo or any other Telehealth app if they want to pay an in-person visit to the hospital for coronavirus testing. In India, on 27th March, the Union Health Ministry urged people to take leverage of telehealth services in this lockdown. From that day, online health consultation has seen a huge surge of 60 percent. One such health and fitness app, Lybrate said that it has witnessed over 60% increase in online doctor consultation on its platform due to the lockdown.
Practo:
Practo, the other major online health consultation app has seen an average surge of 16% week-on-week, with an average rate of 20% per month, during these months. On the Practo app, more than 20 million patients are coming on the app every month and eConsults, of which more than 10% of people are from the Bengaluru alone. Do you know that more than half of the eConsults on the app were related to coronavirus? With most queries coming from the people who are 20-30 years old. Most of the queries were regarding fever, cough, cold, sore throat, and body ache. These queries have increased by one-third in this pandemic.
It is now possible with Online health consultation for those people who are in isolation due to coronavirus to access medical services from home. They can access by audio or video. It will protect patients, doctors, and healthcare workers from infection. With this, people will also be safe from self-medication which leads to further complications. Of course, there are some hidden perils in this service, such as no personal contact and the lack of trust. Others are risk of privacy due to the online data theft, erroneous diagnosis, made at a distance and consequent injuries for patients, medical mistakes which can be due to lack of information provided to healthcare workers.
The telemedicine domain in India has seen growth in recent years. Platforms like Lybrate, DocsApp, Practo, mine, and others allow patients to connect with doctors and schedule virtual consultations. However, the adoption was quite limited that too in metropolitan cities. The comfort of the traditional practice of patients with face-to-face interaction and inertia to change was the key obstacle.
How Telemedicine is helpful in India?
Telemedicine probably is not able to administer full treatment. It acts as a screening method in order to contain the spread of the virus. And eventually leads to control of this disease. At the time of need, the patient can consult a doctor either through video chat or phone. They don’t need to go outside for clinics or hospitals. In this social distancing first time, online health consultation can address the isolated patient queries. The hospitals can focus on those patients who are more serious and critical. Hence, it also avoids overcrowding at healthcare institutions. At Amplework, we are having highly experienced developers who can provide you the best healthcare app development services and other health & fitness app services.
