‘Himachal Pradesh made the app to track coronavirus cases in India’

DHARAMSHALA: Application to track coronavirus cases in India was developed in Himachal Pradesh. The tech experts at National informatics department in Himachal were assigned this task to enable central health authorities to track country wide status of sample collection and patient details. A team of 12 persons worked round the clock for nearly 20 hours for two weeks in curfew days at their offices to launch this application in time.At present this application is tracking more than one lakh tests per day in India.
When contacted, Ajay Chahal, deputy director general and SIO of the National Informatics Center (NIC) at Shimla told TOI that application named RT-PCR was launched on April 25th last month which is aimed to track Covid-19 tests across India and it was developed in Himachal only.
“We were a team of 12 people who worked for 18 days from 9.00am in the morning to 3.00am till mid night to launch this application. The directions for the same have come from Dr. Neeta Verma, our director general of NIC” he added
The mandate of this application is with Indian Council of Medical Research now, but tech experts at Shimla are still updating and making changes on regular bases as per requirements of ICMR.
Chahal said that when work was on war footing, it was a strict lockdown and only a few staff could avail the curfew passes.
“There were no office boys so we made our tea and other stuff ourselves in office kitchen. We use to bring our breakfast, lunch and dinner from our homes” said Chahal.
This application helps to maintain correct database about the number of tests conducted in various states. With the help of this application center government gets details about the number of patients tested. Their details and the person conducting tests were updated through webportal.
“This application helps health authorities to further plan a uniformed policy for country based on the data collected for better controlling this pandemic” said a top health official.
RT-PCR application has remained in lime light during the tussle between Bengal government and Modi led center government this week. The central team visiting West Bengal had accused Mamata Banerjee led state government for discrepancies in data on coronavirus cases there.
This application had enabled center government authorities to get details of all Covid-19 related cases within fraction of seconds without awaiting the reply from state government including Bengal.
With this mobile app, the health workers enter data about patients and tests for both state and center governments to look at. Earlier this application was used by the government health workers and at collection centers only. But now private labs have also started using it.
As per latest information, 312372 samples have been collected through the RT-PCR App this week across the country in last four days. The number is increasing gradually. In single day, on Thursday only the graph has reached 49066 for the sample collection.