BENGALURU : In a multistoried building on north Bengaluru’s Bellary Road, two pulmonary specialists are guiding a doctor, 2,000km away in a district hospital in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, in treating a covid-19 patient.
The Muzaffarpur hospital does not have intensive care unit (ICU) specialists and so a team from Bengaluru-based medtech startup CloudPhysicians is analyzing patient data and helping the doctor make clinical decisions.
India has just 4,500 specialists who can work in ICUs. Even if the country of 1.3 billion ramps up infrastructure and prepares critical care units to treat covid-19 patients, it is woefully short of specialists who can work in these units.