Telemedicine program, of which the trials were done successfully, is set to be implemented formally from Friday April 12, 2019. The program is a joint venture of Lisie Hospital & Heart Care Foundation with the technical support of MAGICS. Once implemented, this will act as a tool to reach out to the underprivileged people in remote locations of Kerala.

Heart disease is the number one disease in terms of mortality in our State followed by Cancer, and this is bound to increase manifolds in view of the exponential growth of non- communicable diseases like hypertension and diabetes. In fact a study conducted by ICMR sometime back rated Kerala No: 1 along with 2 other states in most number of C V D cases.

Our main objective would be to strengthen the Primary Health Centre (PHC) in detecting early signs of the disease and provide expert opinion. This would apart from strengthening the primary health centers will empower the Medical Officers at these centers to identify and pick up such cases early in the future.

The program will in a way revolutionize the health care delivery system in the remote areas of the State. The program envisages patients coming to the PHC to discuss their problem along with the M O to a Cardiologist at Lisie Hospital through telemedicine and thereby get an expert opinion. This would otherwise end up with PHC level and the patient as in most cases economically weak would not bother to take up the case to the next level and have to suffer for life. We are actually targeting that group of people who are in remote areas who cannot reach a District/ Taluk hospital for want of finance and support. Apart from the expert opinion we also can help with follow up cases were otherwise they have to go back travelling long distances and wait in long queues. This would therefore improve the compliance level and thereby the adherence to treatment protocol. As it progress we can add on new tools to get better or accurate diagnosis. This is a beginning and we are going to learn a lot but the advantages of the program will be there for all to see.