Tele-medicine, an important component of e-health, is one of the most rewarding and promising achievements of the advances in information and communication technology. It has unfolded the possibility of narrowing the gap between developed and underdeveloped countries, between cities and villages and between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. Through making services available to the needy in remotest areas, telemedicine can reduce mortality, morbidity, expenses, and psychological strains and can be a very useful tool for producing health for the people at large.

With this in mind, NREN continuously providing technical support for new as well as existing telemedicine initiatives implemented by different organizations. NREN is working closely with a number of telemedicine provider hospitals such as Kathmandu Model Hospital, Institute of Medicine (IOM), National Academy of Medical Science (NAMS), Patan Academy of Health Sciences (PAHS) and with many other hospitals. Besides providing technical support, we also encourage to hold workshop partnering with different hospitals working on telemedicine so that it works as a platform for sharing their experiences and stories in person as well. On this, NREN in conjunction with other partners already organized three national level telemedicine workshops.

After the availability of TEIN bandwidth, sharing of latest clinical innovation and experiences over video conferencing have broadened which also have supported to establish strong partnership with different universities and teaching hospitals across different countries. The use of high bandwidth network significantly helped in upscaling the quality of video conference-based knowledge sharing sessions. Our partner hospitals have been doing regular teaching/training/consultative session with hospitals in different parts of the world using the TEIN network.

Besides these clinical sharings at International level, NREN also has been encouraging and facilitating various healthcare related sharings between and among hospitals and health practitioners at national level. For this, we are using our own platform (eclass.nren.net.np) to hold series of clinical and knowledge sharing sessions. We are inviting many hospitals and rural health centers and sharing their experience and activities in a forth-weekly basis and have a plan to conduct these sessionin a weekly basis with greater participation. We believe that this kind of sharing not only help to bond a strong knot between various health related institutions but also increases the healthcare collaboration between urban based hospitals and rural health centers.