General Business Description:

Telehealth setup would be designed in a way that it will provide innovative virtual link between doctor and patient. This will help us to provide basic health facilities to even the farthest rural areas. Doctors would be willing to work because they will be at the ease of working from their home.

Since last 2 decades telehealth has been emerged as an acceptable solution to provide health care facilities to remote areas.

This model will be based on “Store-and-Forward Telehealth. In this method patient and physician communicates via email or other facilities. A patient will come to the virtual health care center, where a trained medical staff will take his history, perform general examination and record important vitals, all of this information will be stored in a software, which will then automatically be communicated to the doctors. Once the information is on the server, first available doctor will review it and either give his diagnosis and recommend treatment or will ask further questions. In case doctor has some further questions, it will be communicated back to trained paramedical staff who will contact the patient and provide the information. The problem with this system, involved is the time factor which can be from 15 minutes to 24 hours. Now as soon as doctor writes back, staff back at center will call patient and let him know of the treatment.

Lets take a real case scenario and walk through the plan.

John lives in a small town near Faisalabad. One day he started having abdominal pain and associated diarrhea. He came to tele health center in his town. Mr. walker, who works as paramedical staff there, takes his history, and check his temperature. He was found to be feverish at the moment. Mr. Walker uploads John’s information on the server. Then, Dr. Allen reviewed the information and writes back to Walker. He told Walker to give him antibiotics and ORS. Mr. Walker called up John, and told him about doctor’s advice. He asks John to come and pick up his medications.

This gives us an idea that how this idea will work. Now let’s discuss specifics of the idea.

Key Factors involved in the plan:1. Trained Paramedical Staff:

We will select people from the same community and train them for 3 months in a vocational institute. These people will be trained to take history from patient, ask key questions about a disease and perform general examination. They will be hired on contract basis with minimum of 5 year term. At every center there will be 2 staff members working 5 days a week.

2. Telehealth care setup:

We will rent a shop in the area, where we will setup our system. This will include setting up basic medical equipment, including sphygmomanometer, thermometer and Blood glucose monitor. Along with this we will have an i3 desktop computer with the facility of UPS(Uninterrupted power supplier). Internet connection would be arranged either via 3G services or nearby PTCL exchange if possible.

3. Doctors:

Doctors will be hired on share basis. They will be paid for each patient they give consultation on. Initially we will start with general physicians i.e Registered Medical Practitioner with regonized PMDC MBBS degree. Later on we plan on adding different specialists in the doctors network. These doctors will have their own computers at their end, and they will be given option to work for 3 hours daily on a time of their own convenience. Schedule of doctors will be arranged in a way that there would be atleast 1 doctor available for minimum of 12 hours daily.

Initially we will start with 5 doctors and later on expand on that.

Marketing Plan:

Strengths:

When we do a critical analysis of the plan we can safely say that this will help people in remote areas receive good medical care.

Another strength of the idea would be maintenance of records. During communication with doctor and paramedical staff, all vital data related to patients’ condition will be maintained and can be used as a medical history in future if needed.

Store and forward method will help us to work effectively in the areas with low speed of internet.

Weaknesses:

The main problem in the idea would be Time delay between patients’ arrival and diagnosis. Time factor would be the main constraint while managing critical patients and thus the critical patients will immediately be referred to the nearest city.

Next comes the people acceptance. Remote areas in our country has very low literacy rate, and as this idea is a bit advanced, it would take a while to get people accept the idea and start benefiting from it. To overcome this problem, we plan to train paramedical staff form within the community, so in the way, they will own the initiative and it would become easy for other people to accept the idea if it is coming from one of their own.

Strengths Weaknesses

Good Medical Care

in Remote Areas

Maintenacne of Records

Store and Forward Method

Time delay

People embracing the idea

Management Plan:

Vision:

Health for all.

Mission:

To provide quality health care in remote areas of Pakistan.

Objectives:

Short term Objectives:

Provide basic health facilities in one district of Punjab. Reduce time delay of presentation to diagnosis from 24 hours to 6-12 hours. Start pharmacy and diagnostic services at telehealth centers.

Long Term Objectives:

Persuading the government to participate in the project and expand it over whole province initially then to whole country.