Medindia in the News...

The next time you want to fix up an appointment with a physician, don't dial the phone. Looking for a pharmacist in a remote location? Don't get harried. Worried about your child's health when you are moving into unfamiliar terrain? Don't worry. Want to know about any illness in detail? Reach out for the new age device that fits your palm - the mouse - and click on www.medindia.net. "It has the most comprehensive online searchable database on Indian healthcare from all over Indian with 2 lakh entries," says Dr. Sunil Shroff, transplant surgeon and Head of Department of Urology, SRMC at at press conference. He is the brain behind the site which is promoted by Frontpoint Systems (which designed and developed the huge Southern Railway site). It is a healthcare portal which provides the entire array of healthcare information for both the users and medical professionals. "There is nothing in healthcare that the portal doesn't have." "It's the largest and oldest healthcare portal in the country," says Dr. Shroff. "We started in 1997". Why such a delay in announcing it while several other medical portals made big splashes? According to Dr. Shroff, the team at medindia was assiduously working on the content and the database. "The hype about dotcoms came and went, but we are still here," he adds. Medindia is a compendium of services ranging from databases of doctors, chemists, hospitals and similar services all over the country. One could locate a doctor or a chemist or a hospital using different search strings. It also has information on 750 medical colleges, about 500 courses and 100 common health conditions. There are a series of services. For instance, one can maintain his/her medical record online and e-mail it to anybody in any part of the world. This helps keep one's health status updated even while one is traveling. Another service is the pregnancy test. By entering the date of the last period, this facility will tell your likely date of delivery. Reading on, one can learn more about pregnancy, tips on good maternal and child health, possible complications and so on. The list of doctors is exhaustive, says Dr. Shroff. About 35 per cent of all registered medical practitioners are listed at the site. It has about 30,000 chemists. The transplant telemedicine available at Medicine available at Medindia is stated to be the first such facility. The details go to about 700 transplant physicians all over the world. Though there is a plethora of health sites, including the prestigious ones from overseas universities, medindia has its place in the healthcare sector because it is tailor-made for India. For instance, in the nutrition section, food articles, including vegetables and fruits mentioned, are Indian. Similarly, the database on diseases also are specific to India and the South Asian region. The latest technological addition is the WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) enabling of the portal. Using this, all major utilities of the site can be accessed using a mobile phone.