Thiruvananthapuram: The district model hospital at Peroorkada will have online booking system soon. Though it was one of the objectives of the e-health project, introduced by the department of health and family welfare in January last year, it could not start for various reasons. There is an online booking system at SAT Hospital, one of the other 13 hospitals in seven districts where the project was introduced.
Mr N. Sreedhar, additional project director of the e-health project, said, “we are ironing out some issues with the software. For example, some people will prefer specific doctors and would not be OK with all doctors. In this case, on a day when the doctor is absent, a linear logic will not work. We are still working out solutions to such issues,” he said. The initiative will be of use to everyone who is internet-literate, though a huge proportion of a long queue at the Peroorkada hospital was made of old people, who didn’t have a smart phone.
A hardware technician from Karakulam, M.S. Vishnu, one of the young people to stand in the queue, said if there was such a system, he would definitely have used it. Some of the senior doctors too are reportedly finding it difficult to adapt to e-health system. For them, the system interface has been simplified and made more user-friendly, according to Mr Sreedhar. The e-health system promises a centralized database of patient information to automate hospital processes, create e-records of demographic data as well as create easy access to the patient’s medical history.
Even before online booking would work its magic, something which could really shorten the length of hospital queues is if more people visited primary health centres. Most want minor issues to be treated at hospitals, as they are unaware of the facilities that PHC offers. Mr Vishnu said that PHC was primarily for polio vaccination, though just a few kilometres away was the Chettivilakom PHC with a lifestyle disease diagnostic centre. Though the government has technically introduced a referral system offering priority at district hospitals to patients from PHC, they hardly rely on it.
