Timbuktoo or Siberia, the e-doctor is someone who can be at your beck andcall any time of the day. In fact, a recent convention on e-healthcare madea point: Web-based healthcare is still a growing industry, and even scepticsrealise that e-healthcare is the future.

The convention was held in New York, and hundreds of companies keen to jointhe e-healthcare bandwagon participated in it. And it's not just the oneswishing to make big bucks who are joining the e-healthcare fray. Even theAmerican Medical Association (AMA) has decided to launch its own site,called Medem.com, early next year. The AMA says its site will providepatients means to communicate confidentially with doctors online.

As of now, CyberDocs is a group that already provides medical services overthe Internet. The site-www.cyberdocs.com-was started three years ago by DrThomas Caffrey and two other doctors and other specialists in virtualdoctors' visits. CyberDocs offers appointments and 24-hour emergencyconsultation from anywhere in the world. According to Caffrey, the site ismeant for those 30 million Americans who are at any given time travellingoutside the United States. When they fall sick during their heavy work andtravel schedule, they are inclined to speak to an American doctor. That'swhen the likes of CyberDocs are useful.

According to CyberDocs, the drugs that they are able to prescribe are``generally very safe and we're able to do it in very finite doses, just tohelp people bridge the gap so they don't wind up in an emergency room''.Meanwhile, doctors are not alone in the e-sphere. For they are being ablybacked by online pharmacists. Take, for example, a site calledwww.drugstore.com, where pharmacists refuse to give up their whitelab coats. And they still insist on filling out forms. Says thespokesperson, every drugstore.com order is written down with a pen andscanned into a computer.

``After a customer enters a profile and places an order, a pharmacistverifies it and starts a paper trail. The prescription is checked againstother medicines the patient is taking, lest they react badly with oneanother. Then the order is filed in the system, and routed to a fulfillmenthouse somewhere in Texas.''

Thereafter, it's automation time. With the push of a button, an automatedassembly line pours pills into labelled vials. Before the prescriptionships, it's checked once more by an on-site pharmacist, who checks the vialagainst a screen that shows the patient's profile, the scanned prescriptionand a picture of the drug.

But delivery of the medicine is only one side of the story. Handling theinteractive session between customers and the pharmacists is also of vitalimportance. Since its March launch, this site has received 25,000 healthrelated questions. The response time is a problem area though. Unlike inreal life situations, staffers at drugstore.com take a much longer responsetime-an average of 30 minutes. But such stores are working all day and allnight so that even if a question is asked in the middle of the night, a pageis sent out to the on-call pharmacist.

At drugstore.com, they call it working one-on-one with patients. Realisingthe potential of the online one-on-one in healthcare, Indian hospitals toohave begun working on similar lines. But it's a long way off before theyactually prescribe treatment to outdoor patients.