Govt mulls e-medical cards for patients at state hospitals

Vijayawada: The medical and health department is going to come up with a project jointly with the IT department in the state to make medical health records more accessible. This initiative is first of its kind in the state, according to government officials.
Poonam Malakondaiah, health secretary said the government is planning to make electronic health records of all patients visiting the government hospitals in the state.
“The project is completely funded by the World Bank. It will be implemented in a phased manner. The first phase of the project will cover 23 big teaching hospitals in the state,” she said.
“Tenders have been called for the service providers and the IT department of the state will provide technical support for the project. The data will be stored in the government portals to ensure that there would be no breach of security,” Poonam added.
With this facility, poor people coming to the government hospitals for treatment will be able to have a complete health record in digital mode. Besides, the records can be accessed if the patients change hospitals for treatment, according to the health secretary.
She said that the diagnostic equipment will also be linked with the online portal, while the diagnostic reports will directly be saved in the patient’s records, giving less scope for error in reporting the results.
The patient’s data will be entered into the online server by the attending nurses who are well trained and familiar with handling digital equipment by now. “The 13,000 ANMs in the state are already using digital tabs and in many sub-centres, the medical staff are already handling digital equipment. For this project as well, we would train our own manpower,” she said.
The service provider, on the other hand, will be operating in the opex mode to run the day- to- day business like providing and operating desktops at certain hospitals.
The decision was made after Nara Lokesh, IT minister, and N Md Farooq, minister of health education and minority welfare met the officials recently to decide on the modus operandi and coordination. The complete plan of execution is not yet finalised. However, once the tenders are finalised, phase 1 will be implemented in the 23 hospitals by February end, the officials assured.