Endocrine Abstracts

Introduction: India has a huge population of 1350 million and most of it has a patchy availability of healthcare services, where specialist care is not available at most parts of the country. Telemedicine has been recently approved in India by government of India to be implemented during the COVID-19 lockdown as most of the patients will not be able to have the routine in clinic opd consultations.

Aim and objectives: We tried to see the impact and perception of telemedicine in people of central India as to how they perceive this newer concept, how satisfied they felt with it and how they want to go ahead with it. There are no previous studies of this regard in this population.

Materials and methods: 374 subjects from central India who have opted for telemedicine consultation during this COVID-19 lockdown period from 1^st April 2020 to 15 may 2020 were surveyed. All the respondents were novel users of telemedicine. responses were recorded and analysed by simple mathematical calculations.

Result: Most of the respondents 54% used Telephonic consultation only as compared to 46% who used online video consultation, highest number of patient 47.5% took consultation for DM, 80.5% respondents were happy with teleconsultation, 66.7% respondents found teleconsultation better during pandemic but 77.2% said they would like to have in clinic consultation once the lockdown eases and 36.8% don’t like to pay for teleconsultation.

Conclusion: Telemedicine is not the answer to all the healthcare problems, but it can be very important in addressing a vast number of issues. There is a need to spread awareness about this tech-tool to the common man so that they can avail quality healthcare services. We also need to further study the perception of telemedicine as the lockdown eases and its impact in societies with lower education levels.

Keywords: telemedicine, COVID-19, lockdown, online consultation