The present drastic increasing in the number of Corona Virus cases in the country illustrates, in the near-collapse of the health infrastructure under the high burden. The Delhi Corona website showed vacanacies at hospitals have significantly dropped in the past two days.
The National Health Authority or NHA which is the implementing agency of the national health mission and prestigious Ayushman Bharat Yojna, said that the technology-backed intervention would boost vaccination initiative, and could effectively check a gap between demand and supply.
A report says, the Centre is likely to launch the digital delivery of healthcare services together with private sector stakeholders within the next 1 to 2 years with pilot programs underway in as many as six Union Territories, as per a top government official .
“We are looking forward to implementing the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) rigorously. Digital technologies have shown us the way. We will be able to bring all stakeholders onto the platform in 1 to 2 years’ time, and are currently doing pilots in six Union Territories,” Ram Sewak Sharma, chief executive of the National Health Authority (NHA) said.
“We are having a registry of healthcare providers, hospitals and laboratories, and together with them, we can develop a platform for health services delivery to achieve the objective of the national digital health mission,” the official said. He further says, we have readied the Cowin infrastructure to manage high traffic: RS Sharma.
On August 15, 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the ambitious nationwide health program, and said that the initiative will bring “revolution” in the healthcare sector, adding that one health ID would contain medical information of patients.
Sharma, further said that such an initiative could be a win-win situation where private hospitals would have an access to medical records, and would be able to increase their reach, and provide services to rural India without having any physical presence.
The IT-focussed national program has a capacity to conduct 500,000 consultations every day, and has already created nearly 200,000 unique IDs for pilots in Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Andaman & Nicobar, Ladakh, Chandigarh, Puducherry and Lakshadweep.
Government is working round the clock by keeping lot of evangelising,” Sharma said, adding that the artefacts or electronic products such as Aadhaar, e-KYC, digital signatures and digital lockers together with payment gateway like Unified Payments Interface (UPI) could help in creating digital medical records.
Sharma further said that a robust and scalable ICT system would establish eligibility, identity and priority to ensure safe dosage administration to eligible persons.
The most popular CoWIN app operates and manages the nationwide Covid vaccination program with registrations for the third phase for those above 18 years of age, opening up from April 28.