Union Budget 2022 Tele mental health programme: On February 1, during her Budget Speech in the Parliament, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a National Tele Mental Health Programme. The programme, which has been hailed by all sectors of people for having the potential of changing mental health care in the country, is proposed to consist of 23 tele mental health centres with NIMHANS (National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences Bangalore) acting as the nodal centre. Meanwhile, for this, International Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore (IIIT-B) would be providing the technological expertise.

The announcement was made as Sitharaman stated that the pandemic led to an increase in mental health-related problems among people of all age. This move is expected to help people get easier access to quality counselling and care services related to mental health.

Also read | Union Budget 2022: NIMHANS Director praises Centre’s “game-changing” proposal for setting up of National Tele Mental Health Programme

To understand more about this project, Financial Express Online spoke to Professor TK Srikanth, Head of E-Health Research Centre, IIIT Bangalore, who said that the project would be a network of telehealth centres focusing on mental health with NIMHANS at the centre. “Essentially, the centres would be staffed by psychiatrists and other medical staff who help in providing with mental health care services,” he said.

Talking about the geographical coverage of the project, he said, “This will be distributed geographically all over the country so that people can connect to their local doctors who can speak in their local language, as well.”

While the boost to mental health is much needed, especially in a country like India where mental health issues are kept hush hush and often swept under the carpet, an important question is why tele mental health.

“The idea behind this is that the pandemic has made it very clear that mental health is important. There are two aspects to the National Tele Mental Health Programme. One is that the need for mental health support among people is increasing and two, telehealth is a viable way to help patients reach doctors. Tele mental health simplifies things,” said Prof Srikanth. “The main plan is to first set up a whole network and make the services accessible for people across the country. Within that, we are looking at the kind of technology needed to put to all of this together to have a platform on which all of the patient data can be collected and moved around,” he explained.

Essentially, the Tele Mental Health Programme would be a network of centres that are spread across India and are manned locally. However, they will have some level of integration within them in some form, which is currently being worked out. Amidst all of this, NIMHANS would act as the nodal centre which would help in setup design, training, as well as monitoring for all of these centres.

IIIT-B is solely looking at the technology aspect of this programme, and it is working closely with NIMHANS to figure out how technology can play a role in providing people with the mental health services, Financial Express Online has learnt.

As FE Online had reported earlier, IIIT-B had worked previously with NIMHANS to create a mental health platform for Karnataka itself, and so, the two institutions have been working together on such aspects for the past six to seven years now. “There are a range of projects that we have worked on where we look at how mental health delivery service, which could be anything in the mental health in a clinical space, can be improved and digitised with the help of technology,” IIIT-B’s Prof Srikanth said.

One of these projects was the e-Manas mental health platform that had been developed by IIIT-B in collaboration with NIMHANS for the Karnataka government to integrate mental health services throughout the southern state. In 2020, then IIIT-B Director Professor S Sadagopan had informed FE Online that the e-Manas portal was something that had caught the interest of the Centre as well.

Now, while the National Tele Mental Health Programme is currently in its initial stages, the Centre has kept the same institutes – NIMHANS and IIIT-B – to implement this project on a national scale.

According to Professor Srikanth, there are several aspects that need to be brought into this, like features of video conferencing for easy consultation between the patient and the health service provider. A long-term goal is also to integrate patient data so that the mental health records are available on a digitised system. This would remove the need for a patient to carry their health papers everywhere with them while visiting a new doctor, rather allowing the doctors to access the records from a central database after being authorised to do so by the patient. This would in the long-run integrate mental and physical health, allowing the treatment for both to go hand-in-hand rather than in silos, FE Online understands.

However, there are certain challenges, like the fact that health and data related to it is a state subject, which means that the patient data would need to be held separately.

“Our focus is on this technology platform that will get enhanced and we will integrate more and more services into it, so that we can support this network of telemedicine and tele health centres,” he said.