Abstract
ABSTRACT
Literature on teleconsultation is rich in outcome data, and only a smaller body of work has described the operational setup of specific teleconsultation services, mainly from the COVID‐era. However, publications on a routine, non‐pandemic, low‐cost, and asynchronous departmental teleconsultation model built on a widely available messaging application remain scarce. No structured replicable blueprint exists for establishing such a model for follow‐up clinics at the departmental level in a government tertiary care hospital. We describe a step‐by‐step operational framework implemented in the Department of Endocrine and Breast Surgery since May 2025, which has now served 587 teleconsultations (post‐thyroidectomy, post‐parathyroidectomy, breast carcinoma, and pheochromocytoma) over 13 months. The model requires no dedicated funding, no institutional IT infrastructure, and no proprietary telemedicine platform. It uses a dedicated departmental smartphone, WhatsApp, a structured asynchronous review schedule, and a documentation proforma aligned with India's Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) Telemedicine Practice Guidelines, 2020. WhatsApp was selected over e‐Sanjeevani for its asynchronous capability, universal patient accessibility, and zero registration burden. The average clinician time per teleconsultation is 5–10 minutes; the entire daily review session is completed within 30 minutes. The underlying principles are specialty‐agnostic and potentially adaptable to cardiology, neurology, hematology, and oncology, though each specialty would require its own eligibility criteria and escalation thresholds.