State tells chief med officers to generate unique health IDs for every patient
kolkata: State Health department has issued an order to the superintendents and principals of all the medical college hospitals in the state and also to the Chief Medical Officer of Health (CMoH) in the districts directing them to generate unique health IDs for every patient getting admitted under their health establishments.
The move is to ensure better health care for the patients and also to access e-prescriptions, and patient-related data through a centralised system.
All the district administrations were urged to enforce the new regulations laid out by the department after it noticed that many hospitals have not yet taken up the process.
"It has been observed that the process of generation of unique health IDs has not been taken up at an adequate pace at different tiers of health facilities," reads the order.
All the respective health authorities at various levels of health facilities have been urged to expedite the process of the generation of unique health IDs. State government has emphasised making 'e-prescription' mandatory in emergency wards of all government hospitals so that the health department can directly monitor health service-related issues.
The centralised monitoring system will help the department in many ways.
One of the main purposes of the step is to ensure no single case of patient referral is carried out unnecessarily.
The health officials will also be able to track down an individual case through the unique health IDs generated by the hospital at the time of admission.
State government decided to introduce unique health IDs for patients along the policy line of the National Digital Health Mission.
The state Health department has been in the process of setting up a robust infrastructure to maintain a digitised data system so that the documents relating to a patient need not be shifted from one hospital to another in case of a referral.
Doctors from other government hospitals can also pull the data from the centralised system through the unique identification number of the patient.
Production of Aadhaar card or Swasthya Sathi card has already been made mandatory at the time of indoor patient admission or during the stay of the patient at the hospital.
State has now modified the software so that it will automatically generate a unique health ID of a patient once the Aadhaar or Swasthya Sathi IDs are given to the software. The software will ask for OTP sent to the Aadhaar-linked mobile number.
After entering the OTP, the software will generate a unique health ID for the patient.
The health department's order also clarified that admission of patients cannot be denied due to the non-production of ID cards. It may be captured at any time during the stay of the patient. Even if there is a delay in generating unique health IDs due to technical issues, a patient's admission cannot be put on hold, says the order.
