You can e-mail your health now

NEW DELHI, APRIL 14: Patients can chat with doctors from all over the country and also fix appointments with them on the web in a new heal...

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NEW DELHI, APRIL 14: Patients can chat with doctors from all over the country and also fix appointments with them on the web in a new health portal called e-myhealth.com.

Launched here by a multi-national concern, OST International, the site offers individual home pages to any doctor who is free to customise it according to personal needs with picture, profile and other details.

The web site will also offer connections to several other medicine and health-related web sites, including those of magazines and journals. Doctors can read their journals on the site instead of buying them, says Raj Sachdeva, managing director of OST International.

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The site will have online appointment diaries for every doctor on its list on which a patient can select a suitable time for appointment. It will have chat rooms for doctor-to-doctor, patient-to-doctor and patient-to-patient chats.

Another feature of the site is `Track my health’ which will enable surfers to prepare a health profile by putting in details like blood pressure, weight, sugar, etc and compare it with the standard parameters. “It will create awareness about one’s body,” Sachedeva said.

The site, which is free of cost for both patients and doctors, is however yet to include Indian doctors. At present, it has 35,000 US-based doctors, while it will begin including doctors for chat and consultation services in a couple of weeks, Sachdeva said.

The company is being guided by the Indian Medical Association in its selection of doctors and at the same time, it is approaching institutions like the All India Institute of Medical Sciences for expert advice on the site. "We will begin first with the metros and then add on various cities to the list," he said.

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Sachedva said that the site will give a prominent place to Ayurveda and Siddha systems of medicine and intends to attract a lot of patients abroad to the site.

The main source of revenue for the site will be through advertisements, a shopping window which will offer non-prescription drugs, equipment and also through pushing medical insurance policies abroad. The latter will be introduced in India once insurance is privatised here, Sachdeva said.