A three-member team from the Jipmer has left for Sabarimala in Kerala for an assessment of logistics ahead of launching tele-medicine services for offering specialised emergency care to pilgrims visiting the hill-shrine.
The team led by Jipmer Director S.C. Parija will look to finalise the space at a Government Health Centre in Sabarimala which could be used for delivering tele-medicine services from Jipmer.
Dr. Ravi Chitoria, Head, Department of Plastic Surgery, Jipmer and the Nodal officer for the project is also part of the team.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the ISRO had identified Jipmer as the Nodal Centre to provide remote health care over tele-medicine platform to pilgrims of the Ayyyapa Temple in Sabrimala.
In this regard, Jipmer is developing a Space Technology/Telemedicine Centre in Emergency Medical Services (EMS) with dedicated specialists in service 24x7. Under the plan, ISRO will establish the satellite communication facility between Jipmer and the Health centre at Sabarimala, run by the Government of Kerala.
“Once we finalise the space to deliver the tele-medicine services at Sabarimala, we are expecting a visit by a technical team from ISRO to Jipmer,” a Jipmer official said.
The tele-medicine facility at Jipmer will be housed in the Jipmer emergency medicine building, where a chief medical officer will coordinate with the concerned specialist to offer medical advice as and when the need arises at the secondary site in Sabarimala.
Jipmer is already a MHFW-recognised centre for telemedicine and has established tele-medicine architecture on a funding of about Rs. 1.6 crore.
Jipmer uses the tele-medicine platform to connect with various centres in India and abroad such as AIIMS New Delhi, PGIMER Chandigarh, SGPGI Lucknow, KEM Mumbai, CMC Vellore, SRMC Chennai, Sankara Nethralaya Chennai, AIMS Kochi and Harvard University, John Hopkins University and Michigan School of Medicine apart from medical institutions in UK, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, Malyasia and Indonesia.
