Strive for full digitisation of health services: Chief Secy

Chief Secretary Atal Dulloo today held a meeting of the Health & Medical Education (H&ME) Department to take assessment of the measures taken under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) to ensure secure and hassle-free availability of services under this initiative.

The Chief Secretary emphasised upon the Department to make best out of ABDM in creating a system to digitise the services offered by the Health Department. He called for digitisation of health records in a safe and secure manner besides focusing on developing Electronic Health Records (EHR) for safeguarding these for posterity.

He maintained that such an exercise would be highly beneficial for the medics in proper diagnosis based upon the history of the patient and earlier treatments received by him/her. He directed for sending bulk SMSes to the people for creating awareness about the benefits of ABHA to them.

He urged the department to simultaneously take measures for periodical updation of registries of health institutions and health professionals here along with their availability and kind of medical/diagnostic services offered by each of them.

While giving overview of the functioning of this mission, the Secretary, H&ME, Dr Syed Abid Rashid Shah gave out that the main building blocks of ABDM comprises creation of ABHA IDs of the population here besides generating a repository of both health practitioners and institutions in the shape of Health Professionals Registry (HPR) and Health Facility Registry (HFR), respectively.

It was further revealed that till now nearly 90,90,802 ABHA ids had been created for the targeted population of around 1.36 crore. Moreover, the HFR contains all public health facilities and empanelled private institutions also.

Similarly, the HPR contains records of 6,448 doctors and 4,488 nurses working here. It was added that 105 health facilities are extending scan & share facility for OPD admissions thereby generating 53,99,189 tokens till date.

Regarding the introduction of M.Sc Nursing course in the colleges of J&K, the meeting was apprised that 25 seats are available in Government Nursing College, Srinagar, which had been filled by BOPEE here.

It was further disclosed that the introduction of M.Sc Nursing course in the Nursing College at Jammu would be taken up with the University after passing out of the first batch of Post Basic B.Sc Nursing.