iPhone takes up a new at the same time an important role in healthcare applications in India.

An Indian eye hospital is piloting software that will push to doctors’ iPhones retinal images collected from patients in remote locations. Doctors can then quickly send their diagnosis and recommendations from their iPhones, said Anand Vinekar, Project Coordinator and Pediatric Retinal Surgeon at the Narayana Nethralaya Postgraduate Institute of Ophthalmology in Bangalore. Doctors are more likely to have access at all times to their mobile phones than their laptop computers, Vinekar said.

Narayana Nethralaya Postgraduate Institute of Ophthalmology in Bangalore,has launched a telemedicine programme that will screen rural and semi-urban infants for a potentially blinding condition called retinopathy of prematurity, or RoP. All premature babies, with birth weight less than 2kg, are at risk of RoP. Of 27 million live births in India every year, around 8% are premature and 15-20% of them could go blind due to RoP if not screened and treated on time, say Narayana Nethralaya ophthalmologists.

“If an infant needs treatment, it needs to be given within 48 hours or else the retina detaches, causing permanent blindness,” said Dr Vinekar.

Telemedicine revolutionized the health care sector in India. Around 2 million children are born prematurely in the country, out of which atleast 8 lakh have RoP and this joint venture of Narayana Nethralaya and i2i solutions will certainly help them to get a better cure for RoP.

This is how it works :

• Telemedicine software will have technicians at various medical centers and they can upload images of the babies retinas on a secure dedicated server.
• The data in this server can be accessed by a doctor on an iPhone anywhere in the country.
• The ophthalmologist can see and diagnose the images of left and right eyes of the patient. They decide on recommended treatment and send report through the phone to the centre.
• Now the technician will again take a printout of the report with doctor’s digital signature,and gives it to patient’s family.

This helps the doctors to save their time and more over doctors from other hospitals who are located at different places can also download the application to their iPhones, and collaborate in the diagnosis. iPhone is becoming more and more advanced with new applications day by day.

Image Source: iphone, anand vinekar