A scalable mobile tele-consultation framework for enhancing healthcare access

Access to healthcare is extremely poor in almost every region within India due to a variety of factors including large populations, substantially low presence of health care experts, lack of medical resources and economic constraints. The situation is further worse in rural areas where access to doctors is largely absent. In this vision paper, we present a new scalable mobile tele-consultation model for significantly enhancing access to healthcare for patients in both urban and rural settings. Given the scarcity in the availability of doctors, our mobile consultation model can enhance the efficiency of the healthcare delivery system by allowing doctors to cover a much larger patient base within a limited time frame. Our tele-consultation system can also be tailored for a variety of common health conditions including basic health care queries, infectious diseases, HIV, diarrhea, virology and specialized health problems such as maternal care, child care, geriatric care, ophthalmology, cardiac issues etc. In this paper, we specifically describe how our tele-consultation framework can be applied to enhance care for the most pressing health problems in India.