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Syed Amin Jafri in Hyderabad
President A P J Abdul Kalam on Tuesday called for using technological advances to bring cost-effective medicare to the rural masses.
He was speaking after inaugurating an indigenous digital catheterization laboratory at the CARE Hospital in Hyderabad in Andhra pradesh.
Kalam said that mobile clinics, mobile telemedicine and mobile cath labs would not only take medical technologies to the rural areas, but also facilitate treatment of complex and simple diseases in remote locations.
"We have 70 per cent of our people living in the rural areas. Fortunately, we have very big hospitals in urban areas. We have to make these facilities available for our rural people. But how do we do it?" he asked.
Recalling his visit to Uttaranchal recently, the President said mobile clinics in the state serve thousands of people from 40 to 50 villages. This, he said, was one way of how technology can be harnessed to take technology and treatment facilities to rural areas.
Kalam said he was happy to know that the indigenous catheterization lab would make modern medicare more affordable and accessible.
CARE Hospital would offer a coronary angiogram for Rs 5,000 and basic angioplasty for Rs 25,000. This would really make modern medicare cheaper for the underprivileged sections.
Recalling his long association with the CARE Foundation that has developed affordable medical products such as the Kalam-Raju stent , which won the Defence Technology Spin-Off Award for the development of an indigenous coronary stent, he said the creation of clinical database in CARE and other hospitals would mean better research in terms of diagnostic and treatment methods.
He said the research efforts in the medicare field should focus on "how fast we can diagnose, how fast we can treat patients and how we can make medicare affordable for the masses."
CARE Foundation and CARE Hospital chairman Dr B Somaraju, who had co-developed the Kalam-Raju stent, said CARE had grown over the last five years from 100 to 1,000 beds, from 200 to 2,000 professional personnel, from specialty to multi-specialties, and from one hospital to six hospitals.
At Rs 10 million, the indigenous digital cath lab has been set up in a record time of 13 months and at one-third the cost of an imported one.
It was developed in collaboration with Alpha X-Ray Technologies, Siemens and Defence R&D Labs. At present, 55 percent of the lab components are indigenous.
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