Apollo Hospitals is spearheading an initiative to link the health records of patients with the Aadhaar identification system.

The hospital group’s Executive Director-Operations, Sangita Reddy, is personally involved in rallying the various industry bodies (FICCI, CII and Nasscom) towards creating a national pool of electronic health records which can be linked to the Aadhaar.

Currently, different hospitals are working with various software firms to create their own system of electronic health records (digital documentation of patient’s medical history). This only leads to islands of automation which do not connect, said Reddy in an interview to Business Line . But when you link the records with the unique ID system (Aadhaar), it creates a nationalised resource pool with data pouring in from different locations.

For instance, a patient may come to Apollo for a particular treatment. But he or she may also go to other medical institutions for other procedures. Having a single unique ID helps integrates across the IT systems of all these institutions; this saves critical time and effort in patient care, said Reddy.

Reddy has spoken to Nandan Nilekani (who is spearheading the Aadhaar project) and the members of the health ministry.

The FICCI National Council has worked on standard treatment guidelines and a format for an electronic health record. “Once you create standards and formats, then IT companies can easily follow these guidelines and develop their own software which can talk to each other.”

Apollo Hospitals has one million patient healthcare records. But only a part of that is digitised. In the last three years, the discharge summary of every patient has been made available electronically.

Apollo is also trying to get mobile phone companies to create an application that makes health information available at the click of an icon.

swetha.kannan@thehindu.co.in

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