Rachana Ramesh I NT Bengaluru

Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) under its Smart City Project initiative is setting up multispecialty virtual clinics across the city to provide quality healthcare to all sections of the society. These clinics will be set up in 27 Primary Healthcare Centres (PHCs) across the city with a budget of Rs 22 crore.

IOT based medical equipment will be set up in these virtual clinics and a central command centre will be established where the expert doctors will be posted. A paramedical nurse stationed at the virtual clinic, with the assistance of the equipment, will send the medical data of the particular patient to the specialists at the command centre, who will then analyse the parameters and make a diagnosis.

“The entire thing is a cloud based solution and all these clinics will be connected with a high bandwidth,” a Smart City official said. For every specialisation, there will be a separate doctor posted, he added. While this system is not only time saving, it will help the lower middle class and the poor who cannot afford a specialist’s consultation. “It is targeted towards the needy. Take for example, a cardiologist, it is a minimum of Rs 1,000 for a simple consultation without the clinical charges,” another Smart City official said. “It is more like a first time diagnosis where the specialist will prescribe medicines and also provide specific advice and reference, if further treatment is required,” she added.

After the consultation, which will be provided free of cost, the patients will be referred to the concerned government hospitals such as Jaydeva, Victoria or Kidwai, if further treatment is required under governmentsponsored schemes.

Even though the PHCs have a good record of patient history and recognise usual diseases, they are not competent enough to make specialised diagnosis like cardiac issues or cancer. Patient history will also be maintained in these virtual setups and will be swiftly forwarded if the patient is being sent to a different hospital for further treatment.

Various medical devices such as digital stethoscope, sphygmomanometer, glucometer, fundus camera, Snellen vision chart, and ECG facility will be available at the virtual clinic. This project is being implemented for the first time and is expected to strengthen the already existing PHCs and reduce the burden on community hospitals.