Doctors from Gurgaon come together to start pre-medical consultation over the web for overseas patients
To tap the potential of medical tourism in India, a group of doctors associated with some of the major private hospitals in Gurgaon have joined hands and launched a web portal to bridge the gap between them and their overseas patients planning to travel to India for treatment.
Based on a survey of multi-specialty hospitals, doctors and the experience of overseas patients, the web portal — www.OnlineOPD.com — allows overseas patients to choose a doctor for treatment from a panel and also schedule a video conference with him as a pre-medical consultation before actually flying to India for the treatment.
“At present, an overseas patient interested in treatment outside his country first approaches a medical agent and then travels to the destined country without any knowledge about the doctor, the costs involved and the kind of treatment needed for his ailment. We have come across cases where the medical agents misled the patients about the treatment costs involved and duped them. There have also been cases where the patient’s ailment was not serious enough and could be treated locally, but he travelled to India in absence of any pre-medical consultation. But such things are bound to change with this portal. The patient can now upload his medical reports on the portal to be assessed by the doctor, can actually speak to him through video-conferencing and come prepared for the treatment,” said Dr. Sanjay Verma, a well-known eye-surgeon, who is also the brain behind the idea.
As transparency and convenience are integral to the success of any business venture, the portal has been equipped with a real-time language converter tool and an in-built system to record the video conferences for any future reference. “Language should not be a barrier to get the best possible pre-medical consultation and so the new portal gives the freedom to the caller to talk in a language of his choice from among 200 languages. And the whole video conference would be recorded and saved on our servers within 24 hours for later viewing. It brings transparency to the whole exercise,” said Dr. Verma.
Going beyond the medical treatment alone, the Online OPD team also offers to take care of the travel and lodging of their patients flying in for treatment. “Patients can now concentrate on their speedy recovery and stop worrying as for everything else, the Online OPD team would take care of,” added Dr. Verma.
source: http://www.TheHindu.com / Home> Health / by Ashok Kumar / May 27th, 2012
