On January 1, AIIMS-Bhubaneswar will become paperless. Dr Bharati Pravin Pawar, the Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, announced on Sunday that an e-Hospital initiative would soon be implemented. With an equal number of attendants, the top medical centre sees 5,000 patients every day on average. The programme will lessen the wait times for patients travelling from nearby states and distant locations.
A brief about AIIMS in Bhubaneswar to become paperless from 1 January 2023:
Although the hospital now offers online OPD booking, patients and their companions are still required to stand in line from early in the morning to obtain OPD tickets, which are necessary for consultation. Patients can schedule online OPD visits and log in to access all of their medical records once the e-Hospital initiative is in place. On following visits, treating doctors can easily retrieve the patients’ data. By presenting an electronic prescription with the treating physician’s digital signature, patients can obtain medication from any drugstore.
The union minister proposed a number of solutions to deal with the everyday heavy traffic and lengthy patient waits for various services. At many levels of the healthcare service system, she emphasised the need for a well-organized patient referral service system. She used the case of a patient with bronchial asthma who was referred to AIIMS by three state-run hospitals and medical schools to illustrate the need for collaboration between AIIMS and other state-run healthcare institutions in order to develop a strong patient referral criterion.
“An efficient Covid administration throughout the epidemic was made possible by a reliable referral system across the nation. The patients shouldn’t be sent to AIIMS because they can be treated at district-level facilities, she noted.
For the benefit of underprivileged patients, the minister asked the state government to adopt Ayushman Bharat – Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY). She lamented the fact that the Odisha government had not yet accepted this federal programme.
