Posted by meramd
Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:26:00 GMT
Here's what livemint.com has reported on how the Indian healthcare infrastructure is getting a booster shot.
"In New Delhi, MeraMD.com—a health portal that is six months old—aims to provide a countrywide database of medical practitioners, customer ratings of medical services and also sell medicines and insurance online." reports Archana Rai from Bangalore.
MeraMD.com recently launched its doctor and hospital recommendation service based on user feedback. Earlier during the year, meraMD.com launched online search for doctors and hospitals. We are seeing huge interest in our services and plan to increase our offerings for doctors and pharmaceutical companies in the near future.
Posted in meraMD news | Tags journal, livemint, meramd, street, wall | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by meramd
Sun, 20 Apr 2008 01:45:00 GMT
In a recently published report from hitwise there is data on what people search for online. Quite a few people may be surprised by this, but health search tops the list in the category of searches. Nearly half the searches online are health related!
Though this data may be biased towards internet behaviour in US, we think that results in India or any other country are likely to be similar.
The complete report is available here.
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags data, health, online, Search | 3 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by meramd
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:32:00 GMT
There have been 3 special reports on Indian healthcare in The Times of India, Delhi edition, April 13, 2008. These are
1. Reduction of people wanting to get into this profession - Down from 233591 applications in 2006 to 161000 in 2008.
2. Doctors sick of the "torture" by the system
3. Shortage of specialists - just 6 doctors for 10000 people, in some regions like Chattisgarh the reported number is 2 per 100000 people!
All the reports are thought provoking and its time for action. So how do we solve the problem?
The report has suggestions for establishing more institutes of higher medical education and recognizing the medical degrees from other countries. But given that a senior resident at AIIMS gets a stipend that is much lower than the starting salaries of most IT graduates, we will need to attack the issue of doctor pay as well.
What are the other things that we can do?
1. Information Dissemination - ITC's eChoupal has been a success story.. the same platform that provides information about crops, seeds, weather and prices can also give information about diseases and conditions and medicines. This information will be needed to be provided in local languages.
MeraMD.com has a health search that can provide information from reliable sources, but we currently do not have local language support. Using the information obtained from world trusted sources doctor and medical associations, these translations can be done.
2. Telemedicine - We had talked to a number of specialists about telemedicine, but none were convinced about its efficacy as a diagnostic tool. Even if the doctors liked the idea, they were concerned about legal implications for the same. But there is no denying that telemedicine does make sense. It saves people from unnecessary travel and stay costs in many cases, where people from rural areas have to visit larger cities/towns for treatment. Much of this treatment can be diagnosed and administered remotely. 3. Mobile health centers - This requires more strain on the already tattering infrastructure. Doctors would have to visit the rural areas on a predefined schedule. The Indian government has tried to force doctors to be stationed in villages. We think that scheduled visits by mobile health centers may be better.
So what are the issues in the above solutions and why aren’t people already doing this? (Even if this is getting done, why is it not scaling?)
We think that the issues are:
1. Legal: Despite all disclaimers, it is dangerous to give medical information as it can be wrongly used, and can lead to litigation. Even in case of telemedicine, most doctors do not want to give any advice remotely. They are mainly worried about the responsibility factor.
2. Financial Viability: There will be long payback periods for telemedicine equipment. It will be difficult to implement any such program without support from government, hospitals and pharma companies.
So what can be done?
- Government needs to support initiatives like providing medical information to people both financially and legally.
- meraMD.com can ensure that the information is provided in local languages and for maintenance and searchability of the same. i.e. we can provide the back office and technical support.
Posted in Miscellaneous | Tags doctor, echoupal, healthcare, indian, shortage, telemedicine | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by meramd
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:36:00 GMT
Our doctors directory has now crossed 60,000 doctors!
There are about 600,000 doctors practicing in India as per different reports. So we are pleased with the above number. We are hoping that we will make this number reach 100,000 by August 2008.
The directory covers all cities in India, though the maximum doctors are from Mumbai.
Do ask your favourite doctor to join us here!
Posted in meraMD Features, meraMD news, Patients, Doctors and Hospitals | Tags contact, doctor, India | no comments | no trackbacks
