Cost-effective Telemedicine System to combat COVID-19 in India: A proposed Model

Abstract The telemedicine system has documented its concept quite a long time ago. Even though, it only got materialized a decade ago mainly owing to lack of channelization of knowledge and its usefulness. The proper and systematic use of this, can be a boon for a lot of countries’ healthcare system in the present era. The recent fear, the COVID-19 which has been declared a pandemic by WHO, has massively broken the structure of the prevailing healthcare system and the only possible and even better alternative that has been realized by many countries is the Telemedicine. A country like India with extremely high population and with a low per-capita income, is still fighting such an infectious disease without proper approach. Telemedicine can thus be a new light for India but no implementation models have been reported so far. This paper proposes a model and the means to incorporate telemedicine in the existing healthcare system to combat COVID-19. The model aims at creating both cost-effective and time-efficient solution to treat patients while maintaining proper distribution of resources.