Soon, doctors to access your case files online

New Delhi: Soon, patients can walk into a hospital without carrying files containing their previous scans and other health records. All they will need to do is quote their Aadhaar number. With an intent to let patients’ records flow seamlessly between healthcare providers, the Union health ministry has invited bids from system integrators to develop a software and establish a platform where doctors and patients can access their medical record through a portal and ensure that electronic patient medical record can be shared across various facilities.

The Electronic Health Record (EHR) system that the health ministry plans to introduce will link the hospitals with one another so that people do not have to carry their medical reports. “We have invited bids from system integrators to develop a software and establish a platform for us and run it for five years. The bids will be open soon,” Sunil Sharma, joint secretary in the health ministry said.

To facilitate the system, a National e-Health Authority will be set up that would use Aadhaar-based biometric information to store health records, including the medical history, procedures undergone, diagnosis, name of hospital, drug prescribed, etc., of the patients. All this information will be accessible on a cloud-based e-application to the doctors across departments and among hospitals, ensuring quick transfer of information from one hospital to another. “The Aadhaar number will be used as the unique health identifier. This is specially relevant in cases of people sharing same names, surnames or even the same date of birth,” said another official.  

However, in case of the unavailability of Aadhaar, patients can be registered with government-assigned identification cards.

The shift from paper mode to digital mode will happen in a phased manner in hospitals across the country. According to Mr Sharma, the plan is to link Central government hospitals and state government hospitals in the first phase and then rope in the private hospitals. “Many hospitals in southern states have developed IT systems and are going paperless. States like Telangana has already started capturing unique identification numbers of patients,” added Mr Sharma.

We will first link up the government hospitals and then bring in private establishments. However, there will be no denial to patients in case they are not carrying their Aadhaar cards,” added Mr Sharma.

Officials expect that the paperless medical system will help improving the quality of healthcare. “The medical records will be available whenever and wherever needed. It will ensure better follow up, will reduce errors and at the end processing large volumes of medical data will help in research and analysis purpose,” added the official.