63%of Pakistan’s population lives in rural areas, but 80% of doctors and 60% of healthcare facilities are in urban areas. This opens the doors for telemedicine.
What is the status and scope of this in Pakistan?
You should for better health care in rural Pakistan is not telemedicine at all. It is changing our concept of Medical Education. We should liberate medical education and make it available to those who over want to peruse it. And the rigid regulation is the single reason why we have Poor healthcare delivery in rural Pakistan.
You don't need to train a super specialist to do heart operations and angioplasty. All you need is a structured training program for young MBBS doctors, for six months to take care of heart problems, diagnose heart disease that, we need to build telemedicine programs across the country. Telemedicine programs can virtually bring a specialist doctor on your mobile phone whenever you are sitting and wherever the doctor is sitting.
Technology allows virtual consultation and the majority of the healthcare issue can be treated with telemedicine. 99% of the time when a person is on when he doesn't require an operation, he requires a consultation and a doctor to see his images and reports and interpreted them. All this data can be transferred today to your mobile phone. Why should a patient sit in front of the doctor? So, it is possible but unfortunately, it is not used to the extent it could. You have always been an advance of low-cost healthcare. How can heart disease treatment be made affordable in Pakistan? Regarding this, I spoke to a heart surgeon, and he said that I lived in England 25 years ago, the first patient. I operated in Pakistan and paid 150000 rupees for the heart surgery and today that's 25 years later we are doing the same heart operation for 120000Rs. I don't think any service for a product in this country in this world is procured or bought at half the Procurement charges. What is probably 25 years ago? This happened because of our incessant strive to make heart surgery affordable to the common man. We need to do two million heart surgeries a year in Pakistan. All the heart hospitals in the country put together perform less than 120000 heart surgeries. What happened to the remaining 1.9 million people? They die gradually over a while, and they are old retired people, NO they are young blood winners of the family. In the process, with perhaps produce one of the largest numbers of young widows in the world. How long we can accept it, it can’t go on. We have to address it. If a solution is not affordable, it is not a solution. Cost afflict care should become affordable. People should be covered by various low-cost health insurance so that they can pay for health care and this has to be done, it has to be done today. And we believe the right policies in the country can make it happen. We don't need health cards, we don't need any of the big-time investments by the government. We just want them to change the policies towards medical education and healthcare delivery. Believe me, we will become the first country in the world to dissociate Healthcare from affiliates.
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