KOCHI: Falling sick while you are away from home can be a very harrowing experience. More so, if you have to visit a doctor who has no idea about your health, medication or vulnerability to side-effects. But now solution is at hand. Soon enough you will be able to access your medical records on the net, by just logging in with a user name and password.
All this will be accessible on the web portal. Health officials said that the project has been scaled up to include the finer details, so as to make the state the first to implement the e-health and e-medical programme.
The state health department and officials are working in the final stages of the request for proposal (RFP) which will be ready in a couple of weeks. The RFP will be open to anybody who satisfies the pre-qualification criteria.
“We are chalking out the finer details of the privacy and security aspects of health data. The state will have access of the e-health records, which pertain to community studies and disease indicators. However, the medical records of an individual are his own and he will have access through an unique id,” said principal secretary (health), Dr K Ellangovan.
The state had won the megaproject from the department of electronics and information technology of the union ministry of communication and information technology last year, developing an electronic demographic database and a hospital automation system. The project envisages a central data server holding health and demographic data of the population and linked to the HMIS (health management information system) projects of all health institutions in the state.
He said that the use of data and privacy of data was being discussed threadbare, as to who would access the data and the protocol to be followed on the access.
Even as the e-health project moves closer to reality, the ministry of health has already notified the standards on data entry for identity when hospitals are shifting to electronic storage system. “It might seem simple, but if there is no uniformity in how the person’s name is entered, it will become two records. So we want to ensure that either the first name or surname being used first uniformly. The first level of entry is very important as far as an individual is concerned, especially when it becomes a document,” said union health secretary, R K Jain.
In the second phase, the ministry is proposing to have an authority which will manage the EHR and EMR projects. He said that all e-projects which concern the access of individual records and involve the issue of privacy and security of the data would be within the IT Act.
