President Pranab Mukherjee invites Raj firm to set up telemed clinics in Haryana

JAIPUR: In June this year, President Pranab Mukherjee adopted five villages in Haryana – four in Gurgaon district and one in Mewat – to make them model villages. Now, Rajasthan’s Karma Healthcare has just launched a telemedicine clinic at one of these villages. The firm had earlier set up such facilities in rural Udaipur. “We were honoured to get a call from the President’s Office asking if we might set up these facilities in Haryana,” Jagdeep Gambhir, the force behind Karma, told TOI.
Karma Healthcare runs eight clinics in Udaipur, each of which is used by around seven villages.“Habitations are rather spread out in Rajasthan, so we have to think about the scale of operation that we can sustain,” Gambhir, an engineer who has worked in the past with investment bank Goldman Sachs in the US, said.
So what precisely is telemedicine? “Ideally, for medical treatment, the doctor should be near. Physical touch, faith and trust are all vital to the treatment experience. However, given conditions in rural areas and the huge dearth of doctors, it will be a long, long while before doctors are available for all our rural people. Technology can be used to bridge that gap – we have six doctors working for us from their private clinics in urban centres. These are doctors functioning out of private clinics, who sometimes have time on their hands. They appear to the patients on a large TV that we have in the clinic and each clinic is staffed with at least one nurse and pharmacist. The nurse notes down the prescription, after the doctor has remotely conducted the examination, and we generate an e-signature that makes the prescription a genuine one, after the doctor has gone through the nurse’s notings.” The pharmacist then gives out the medicines.
Gambhir explained that in the over two years that the first such clinic was set up, the numbers of clinics have grown and at least 37,000 patients have been treated so far.
“People stop going to quacks when they begin to have faith in our doctors. We are not an NGO doling out free services. We charge and are a for-profit enterprise, but our motto is to work with compassion. Our effort now is to see how compassion can be scaled up,” Gambhir said.
The telemedicine facility in Rajasthan, with 32 staff, also helps rural people who need to be referred to hospitals elsewhere negotiate the specializations at different hospitals. They call up doctors and fix appointments, so illiterate patients don’t have to figure out for themselves how to meet the cardiologist or ophthalmologist at a large urban facility.
Gambhir also has staff engaged in outreach work, so that the benefits of the facility are widely publicized and people are encouraged to approach his clinics.
Having just set up his first facility in Dhaula village of Sohna tehsil in Gurgaon, Gambhir says the response has exceeded his expectations. “We too are only learning. We have had over 100 patients visit since the Tuesday launch. I was initially all for consolidating our work in rural Rajasthan, but how could I pass up an opportunity like this one?” he asks.
Bureaucrats at the President’s Office were not available for comments on Friday.