ASSOCHAM advocates setting up laws and bylaws of ICT in healthcare

To facilitate the implementation of Information & Communication Technology (ICT) in healthcare sector, the Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) has suggested the introduction of laws and bylaws mandating the adoption of ICT over a period of time.

Chairman of the ASSOCHAM's healthcare council Dr B.K. Rao said, once the law as imposed, the government should initiate a route of offering an incentives to the paramedics/medical institutions for encouraging the use of ICT in hospital administration, or penalize them strictly if they are hindering the ICT adoption by any means.

Another route of paving smooth way of incorporating ICT in the healthcare sector is by linking the patients' records with PAN or UID (Adhar Car No.). This linkage will negate the hassle of providing a unique ID to every patient. The government should establish more databases/data repositories for better utilization of ICT in healthcare.

Till date, there are not regulations for the adoption of ICT in the Indian healthcare sector. Although there are several guidelines in flotation, none of them imposes mandatory adoption over a period of time. Several guidelines and recommendations are mentioned in the Planning Commission's 12th 5 year Plan, but no strict regimen is there in place imposing the adoption of ICT by the medical institutions, said Dr. Rao.

There are various hospitals in India who have implemented HIMS for the management of EHR/EMR. The patient records are maintained at the department and hospital level, but these records are not centralized at the state/national level. The movement of patients cannot be tracked if he/she is visiting difference hospitals for getting treatment as there is a lack of interoperability.

Dr Rao futher said, the government in December 2013 has launched the national health portal in Delhi. The portal aims to serve as a repository of medical history of over one billion Indians. The portal is funded by the union ministry of health a family welfare, and is being developed by the centre of health informatics, national institute of health and family welfare. The portal is a single point of access to public health informatics.

Cloud computing services from BSNL IDC together with Dimension Data, have been chosen to host India's national health portal using public compute-as-a-services (CaaS). The government has not yet taken the effort to set up a recommended set of data standards which can be followed by all hospitals and institutes while storing data. Unless data standards to be followed are finalized soon, linking/merging of diverse sets of healthcare data will be close to impossible in the future. The project objective is also to improve health literacy of the masses in India.

Government in partnership with the private firms should focus more on capacity building in or to deal with the challenge of scalability. There are several initiatives that government has taken under the NeGP.

Village Resource Center (VRC) concept was devised by ISRO to provide a variety of services such as tele-education, telemedicine, online-decision support, interactive farmers' advisory services, tele-fishery, e-governance services, weather services and water management. By providing tele-education services, the VRCs act as learning centers focused on the virtual community. At the same time, VRCs will provide connectivity to specialty hospitals, thus bringing the services of expert doctors closer to villages. Nearly 500 such VRCs have been established in the country.

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