BENGALURU: What if you could access medical consultation and advice from experts while sitting at home? Bengalurubased telemedicine platform Board of Doctors allows you to do just that. Founded by well-known dermatologist and head of dermatology at Manipal Hospital, Dr Mukta Sachdev, IT professional Sanjay Taneja and corporate head Shweta Shetty, Board of Doctors provides patients the opportunity to consult specialist doctors from India and across the world.
The platform aims at providing online consultation with senior and experienced medical professionals, who can provide advice, including second opinions for complex cases and curation of panels of multidisciplinary doctors, said Sachdev. “The patients can be assured of access to specialists on one single platform irrespective of the hospitals that the doctors are aligned to or the cities they are located in,” she added. Currently more than 100 doctors from various specialties are on board the platform. “Doctors are being onboarded every week.
The first set of doctors from overseas is being onboarded in the next few days, making it the go-to platform for primary and second opinions not just with super specialists and sub-specialists in India but also with those based in the UK and US,” Sachdev says. She says that the need for an online platform of health specialists has long been felt, especially for chronic and critical ailments.
“Every patient is looking for an expert second opinion to endorse the prognosis and treatment. That is the needgap we were looking to fill,” she said. The dermatologist said that after the first lockdown was announced last year and telemedicine guidelines were revised by the government to allow virtual consultation, many of the states’ medical councils had banned and not recognised online consultations. “Our platform for second opinions was still under development at that point in time when we had to double up and go live.
The adoption of telemedicine by the common man for primary consultations was almost instantaneous and we have seen that boardofdoctors. com is being used for primary, follow-up and second opinions since its launch,” she added. With the pandemic continuing, the online platform is also offering services to Covid-19 patients. Taneja has 25 years of experience in the IT sector and has managed the IT infrastructure at NASA and Mergers & Acquisition at Life Technologies, a Biotech company based in the USA. Shetty had a long association with the Coffee Day group.