Parents’ Experience with Medanta eClinic

Taking a break from blogging about systems to document an anecdote — this is a bit of a thoughtful review, and a bit of a rant.

The topic for this writeup is my parents’ experience with a premier hospital chain’s telemedicine service. The tone will be disappointing, reflecting the experience.

The tl; dr is — minimal facetime with the doctor (1–2 minutes), pushy and borderline unethical tactics by his sidekick after, incompetence by the administrative staff in getting them access to their prescriptions afterwards, and incomplete delivery of information in the prescription.

Elaborating on these a little bit — I advised my mom to get a second opinion on some knee issues, and they scheduled a telemedicine appointment with Dr. Vivek Dahiya at Medanta. My parents reported being rushed by the doctor, and having to ignore his attempts to wrap up the conversation in 2 minutes to be able to squeeze all their questions in. Nevertheless, it ended quickly, and that’s the better part of their ordeal.

They were told that the team will follow up with them on the prescription etc. They waited for over an hour and no one called back to follow up. They ultimately called back, were bounced from person to person, and ultimately told that their prescription was on some app which required 10s of calls for them to be able to access. A couple of hours later, they succeeded, and some sidekick called them to follow up. The sidekick apparently contradicted his own doctor’s prescription, and “advised them” on the risks of the prescribed medication, and recommended a surgical intervention ASAP. The ethical implications here should be obvious to the reader. There’s an icing on this excrement cake — the doctor prescribed some exercises, but knowing anything about those exercises requires another paid appointment with the hospital physiotherapist.

The most disappointing thing about this experience is that it did not happen in an overburdened public hospital or in a small town hospital. This hospital chain is supposedly at the forefront of telemedicine adoption in the region — something I genuinely believe has the potential to democratize access to good medical care. I do not doubt the good doctor’s competence in the knowledge of medical care, but it is one of those services that is as good as its delivery, and the delivery here was atrocious.