NEW DELHI: In a significant achievement, eSanjeevani, Govt. of India’s free telemedicine service, has crossed another astounding milestone by clocking 8 crore teleconsultations. The last 1 crore consultations were recorded in a remarkable time frame of around 5 weeks, signaling a wider adoption of telemedicine. An e-health initiative of Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, eSanjeevani is a national telemedicine service that strives to provide an alternative to the conventional physical consultations via digital platform.

In less than 3 years, this initiative has garnered the distinction of being the world’s largest government owned telemedicine platform. It consists of two verticals that cater to patients across all states and UTs successfully making its presence felt in the innermost regions of the nation.

The first vertical eSanjeevani AB-HWC endeavors to bridge rural-urban digital health divide by providing assisted teleconsultations, and ensuring that e beneficiaries of Ayushman Bharat Scheme are able to avail of the benefits they are entitled to. This vertical operates on a Hub-and-Spoke model wherein the ‘Ayushman Bharat-Health and Wellness Centers’ (HWCs) are set up at state level, act as spokes, which are mapped with the hub (comprising MBBS/ Specialty/Super-Specialty doctors) at zonal level. With the objective to provide quality health services to a patient residing in rural areas, this model has been successfully implemented in 1,09,748 Ayushman Bharat Health and Wellness Centres (AB-HWCs) and 14,188 Hubs, achieving a total of 7,11,58,968 teleconsultations.

eSanjeevani OPD is the latter vertical which caters to citizens in both rural and urban alike. It leverages technology via smartphones, tablets, laptops enabling doctor consultations to be accessible from the patient’s residence regardless of location. eSanjeevani OPD has acquired 1,144 online OPDs with 2,22,026 specialists, doctors and health workers that have been trained and onboarded. This platform has an impressive record of having served over 4.34 lakhs patients in one day. Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Mohali, which is providing holistic technical training and support to users, is augmenting the faculties of this vertical to be able to serve up to 1 million patients per day.

eSanjeevani is a cohesive part Ayushman Bharat Digital Health Mission (ABDM), and more than 45,000 ABHA IDs have been generated via eSanjeevani application.

Leading ten states for usage of this platform are: Andhra Pradesh (28242880), West Bengal (10005725), Karnataka (9446699), Tamil Nadu (8723333), Maharashtra (4070430), Uttar Pradesh (3763092), Madhya Pradesh (3283607), Bihar (2624482), Telangana (2452529), Gujarat (1673888).