The government of Telangana is planning to digitize the public healthcare records in all the government hospitals and all those records are expected to be linked with Aadhar numbers of the patients.

Revealing the government’s plans K Taraka Rama Rao, minister of information and technology, government of Telangana, said, “For the first time in the history of India, the Telangana government is planning to take up the mammoth task of digitizing the healthcare data of more than 3.5 crore population in the state. To begin with we are working on a pilot project to digitize the records of government hospitals.”

The main objective of digitizing the healthcare records is to facilitate managing the disease profile of the state and accordingly the government can take major initiatives to support the healthcare sector in the state.

According to sources from the healthcare department, very soon the project is expected to be launched from Gajwel constituency by chief minister K Chandrasekahar Rao. Moreover the government is also planning to link the healthcare records of the public with their Aadhar cards, so that the public healthcare centres can directly access the health records of any patient.

As digitizing the healthcare records of the entire population of a mammoth scale is a tough task, the state government is encouraging new entrepreneurs to search for innovative solutions. As part of this, the government is also planning to have an innovative fund from next year, wherein interested persons can take an opportunity to convert their ideas into provide solutions for digitizing healthcare records or anything that serves to the purpose of healthcare sector.

For setting up an innovative incubation centre for healthcare on lines of recently launched T-Hub (for IT), the state government recently inaugurated foundation for Centre for Healthcare Entrepreneurship (CHE) at IIT Hyderabad campus. This new incubation centre will encourage innovation and entrepreneurship in the field of healthcare systems such as medical devices, and various other technological equipments used in the healthcare sectors. The CHE is funded by two entrepreneurs Raj Mashurwal and Avi Nash Manudhand from Silicon Valley. “Initially CHE will be open to only students of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad. Based on the progress we will expand it to students from other institutes as well,” says, Prof Desai, director, IIT Hyderabad.

According to the professor, any student can register and enter into the incubation centre and develop their ideas into products or solutions that serve the needs of healthcare sector in the country.