Why is remote cardiac imaging so important in India?
We are a big country with 1 billion people and not all of them have access to a cardiologist. If you look solely at children with heart disease, there are about 25 qualified pediatric cardiologists in this country and they are concentrated in the big cities, Bangalore, Delhi, and Chennai. So if we have a patient in remote areas of our country, he has no access to a diagnosis. He can’t move on to the stage of management; he doesn’t even know what the problem is. Traditionally patients have come to us by several means – either by train or bus or a car – and somehow got to a center where they can get a diagnosis. We felt that one way to alleviate this problem was to provide teleechocardiography; this enables us to can make a diagnosis for them in their home town, give them an appropriate management plan, and then if they need some intervention they can get on a train and get to where they need to get it done. It’s basically a good way of screening for whether they really need the treatmen
