Can you imagine your life without your eyes! You would possibly answer, “very tough”. But in reality, it is just impossible and unimaginable to think about how an individual with total blindness will feel.
India is a vast country with over 70% of its population living in rural areas. In addition to basic facilities, high-quality healthcare is one thing which the rural population looks forward to with a lot of hope, this includes Eye Care. While eye hospitals are coming up in the vicinity of rural areas when there is a need for a seasoned ophthalmologist’s consultation as an expert opinion, a lot of time is wasted in fixing up his program and arranging for his visit.
This is where Teleophthalmology has made a huge difference by balancing time and need perfectly well to the advantage of both, patients and doctors.
What is Teleophthalmology?
The past few decades have seen leading eye care institutions across India, explore Telemedicine ophthalmology at a greater depth and have been successful in introducing it as a sure and certain solution to reach quality eye care services to deep village inhabitants and rural sectors which do not have a good quality eye hospital in their neighbourhood.
The ophthalmology telemedicine system makes use of technology to provide expert eye care to patients, mostly to those who live in rural areas. The technology enables local technicians to gather all the relevant information after an initial examination of the patient’s eyes and share it with an expert ophthalmologist’s opinion and advice, irrespective of wherever the expert is located. This saves the patient a lot of time and cost that expert would have otherwise had to incur due to travel.
How Do Virtual Eye Exams Work?
Teleophthalmology care can also be understood as a virtual eye exam where the ophthalmologist takes a look at your eye from wherever he is located.
The Teleophthalmology program involves a number of steps. Let’s take a look at them.
Planning the Camp
It all begins with proper and meticulous planning of an eye camp at the site, not days but months in advance. The entire program is headed by a camp coordinator who coordinates with the local village heads as well as his home hospital.
The camp commences on the scheduled day and involves the following steps.
- Patient Registration
- Vision Check
- Refraction
- Slit Lamp examination
- Intra-ocular pressure (IOP) test
- Fundus Examination
- Doctor’s consultation
- Patient counselling
- Spectacles sales counter
The camp winds up after the patient is counselled by the support staff on the next step involved after the consultation with the eye specialist, virtually.
Wrapping Up:
Teleophthalmology in India is picking up rapidly and is seen as a great asset, especially when it comes to offering professional eye care services to the rural population.
To know more about how Teleophthalmology consultation is extremely useful, please connect with Apollo Telehealth, your most trusted partner for Teleophthalmology care in India.
