The project has been envisaged and is in progress keeping in view two goals. First one is to connect Primary Health Centres (PHC's) with expert radiologists/ doctors & dentists at Medical/ Dental colleges and Hospitals using suitable Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) tools and channel for real time radiological data transmission. This platform would enable physicians at remote level PHC's to have real time radiological diagnosis for their patients. Further, experts could use this platform to collaborate. The high-bandwidth and low-latency capability of the NKN would provide an ideal platform for data transmission as radiological data is huge in size and thus poses problems for utilization in real time because of latency in data transmission. This would prove to be of extreme value for both patients and primary level physicians in rural areas for radiological consultation with experts sitting at tertiary centres in real time and thus provide better diagnosis and treatment.

The second objective was to use this platform to build a repository of rare clinical cases for teaching of medical and dental students thus providing these students with an opportunity to study cases which are currently limited to the centers of excellence in medical and dental field.

With this vision an application "CollabDDS: Collaborative Digital Diagnosis System has been developed". The strength of CollabDDS over telemedicine/web based consultation lies in its real time collaborative environment where both the doctor and expert will view the same image simultaneously. The expert could interpret the image for diagnosis. This kind of a collaborative activity amongst PHC's with Medical/Dental Colleges & Hospitals and Centres of Excellence would help to provide improved diagnosis.