International scenario and best practices of telemedicine in India: A Comparative Study

The amount of health care service delivery through digital platforms has grown due to recent technological
breakthroughs, smartphone availability, and improvements in internet speed and data transfer. Telemedicine services are still not widely used or integrated in India because of a number of obstacles. Lacking of administrative and regulatory clarity around the use of technology for service delivery and health service providers' reluctance to accept new innovations are the main causes. The health care sector is presently going through a significant and permanent transition. Despite its sluggish expansion in India, telemedicine and ehealth will soon be clearly performed in the majority of Indian hospitals as a separate department before finally merging into the corresponding medical specialty. The present state of telehealth and telemedicine in India is evaluated in this review. Lastly, relevant literature and official papers from the Health Ministry were reviewed. The use of technology to deliver medical services and information remotely, without requiring patients and healthcare professionals to be in close physical contact, is known as telemedicine. India is a perfect place for telemedicine because of its vast population and diversified terrain. In 1999, telemedicine operations were initiated. The global expansion of telemedicine has been expedited by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID 19) pandemic. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to improve and broaden telemedicine's capacity to handle a range of healthcare requirements, including patient monitoring, healthcare information technology (IT), intelligent diagnosis, and support. Since then, a SATCOM-based telemedicine network has been implemented nationwide by the Indian Space Research Organization. A number of government organizations, including the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare and the Department of Information Technology, state governments, and India's top medical and technological institutes, have taken steps to offer high-quality healthcare facilities to the nation's rural and isolated areas. These obstacles seem to be eliminated by the telemedicine practice guidelines published in March 2020 and the telepsychiatry operational guidelines published in May 2020, which support fair access to medical treatment. The writers of this paper address the extent of these recommendations.