Do away with prescription pads. And the often illegible handwriting of the pre-occupied physician. Because now, like everything else, medical requirements too can be met with a few taps on an app.
Meet Mobydoctor, the new app that allows doctors to access and manage patient records from the palms of their hands.
“With the world moving towards mobility, the next generation of doctors will need an application that lets them do their job on-the-move. So we’ve brought a full-fledged hospital management system on a mobile platform,” says K.R. Natarajan, head of operations at Devatech Info Systems Private Limited, a Chennai-based IT and IT-enabled services firm that developed the app.
The app provides doctors easy access to patient information, prescriptions, lab reports, clinical information, case notes and more. The doctor can register a patient and the patient can then access his own records through an automatically generated login pin number. It can also be accessed by lab technicians and pharmacists, creating a digital ecosystem for the transfer and storage of medical information.
This way, test reports can be ordered and uploaded directly on the app, and stored for future referrals; the pharmacist is aware of the drugs the patient has previously used; and the patient has all his medical records safely stored. “Usually, there’s no trail of the investigation of patients. Now the patient has a track of his ailments and prescriptions,” says Natarajan.
“ The app provides doctors easy access to patient information, prescriptions, lab reports, clinical information and case notes. ”
The patient also has access to a drug directory, with details about the drugs prescribed, its composition and what it treats, giving him more information about his prescriptions.
They can book appointments online and can also connect with doctors and find new ones who are using the app. SMS alerts also remind patients of their medications and doctor's appointments.
Most importantly though, the doctor has access to patient history, family medical history, allergies and immunisation. He can save prescription templates for common ailments such as fever, cough, flu and customise the app for efficiency and convenience.
Should he choose to, the doctor can also make himself available for online diagnoses, where patients can send queries for a fee, making the physical distance between the doctor and patient irrelevant.
“The medical council of India is moving towards transparency and they say that once a person’s case records are written, it can only be edited with addendum. You can’t change the record that has already been set up,” explains Natarajan. With drop-down menus, the app is easy to access and provides a list of exhaustive questions about the patient, so that the doctor can feed in any information he deems relevant.
“The patient might go in with a cough or cold, and the doctor will have the option to order and record details of an entire health check-up should he want to check for respiratory problems.”
The app, currently available for Android and Windows, has been released for a global platform and is available in multiple languages.