The Disease Management Association of India (DMAI) recently sent a representation to Union health ministry urging it to adopt IT based healthcare system in the country to enable delivery of timely and reliable healthcare services to the patients. In the representation, the association pointed out that, for the governments to become a provider of universal healthcare, it is essential to first build a system that is IT enabled, to ensure an outcome driven healthcare system based on transparency and accountability.

It is understood that, in spite of the huge requirement, today there is hardly any budget allocated by the government specifically for the use of information technology in health. DMAI informed that though the government has considered and earmarked some budget for IT development under the 12th five year plan i.e. from 2012 to 2017, more definite efforts need to be put in for exploring its full potential.

Especially, since IT can be used in many ways to improve the healthcare by actively involving and enabling public to participate in health decision making process for better management of health programmes and health systems at all levels. Along with providing support to service providers for better quality of care and follow up.

Rajendra Pratap Gupta, president, DMAI informed that one of the biggest uses of IT can be for propagating telemedicine to enable timely healthcare services in the remote locations throughout the country, as it will enable consultation support to doctors at primary and secondary facilities from specialists at tertiary centres.

He stressed, “With careful planning and efficient implementation of IT in health, India will be able to attain the position of being a world class healthcare services provider since everything will be done online just a click away. It would also help the healthcare providers in getting updated data on disease surveillance based on reporting by service providers and clinical laboratories both public and private to detect and act on disease out- breaks and epidemics.”

Highlighting some important points DMAI stressed that if IT in healthcare is adopted in an elaborate manner it would enable universal registration of births, deaths and cause of death etc allowing the government to get an updated and timely access to the maternal and infant death reviews. Gupta further stressed that governance would also enable out-patient and in-patient information through electronic medical records (EMR) to reduce response time in emergencies and improve general hospital administration, along with generating data on human resource within the public and private health system.

The association further stressed that to ensure this the policy makers should lay IT system standards, and define indicators that would be openly shared. States should also be funded for their initiatives in this field at primary or secondary levels through the National Health Mission along with health surveys that should be conducted annually to generate district level information on health status, which will also help in serving and verifying the accuracy of routine health information system.