Image credit- 4rai.com
Different government hospitals in Tamil Nadu will soon be getting virtually connect 58 computed tomography (CT) and 18 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines. The fully networked teleradiology system will be officially launched in a few weeks. While doctors and technicians are currently being trained to use the system, a few hospitals have already started using it.
The teleradiology system will allow select images to be uploaded to a central server and radiologists from any of the hospitals that are connected to the network can access the images and give immediate medical opinion.
As part of networking the machines, a tower for dedicated connectivity has been set up at each hospital to share the images with a central server. Except for four locations, this work has been completed in the rest of the centres.
To incentivise doctors to report scans uploaded from other hospitals, they will be paid them a certain amount, which is yet to be finalised.
10 hospitals in Uttar Pradesh and 20 hospitals in Haryana have been similarly networked. Kerala is in the process of implementing it across the state. In the private sector, Columbia Asia chain of hospitals in India has networked 14 hospitals.
