The ambitious e-health project of the State government, a World Bank-aided project that envisages the development of electronic health records (EHR) of the population and end-to-end automation of all government healthcare institutions, along with the integration of an electronic demographic database, is being launched on Wednesday.
The project is already on a pilot run in 12 healthcare institutions in Thiruvananthapuram district and will be scaled up across the State.
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan will officially launch the project. This is the first-of-its-kind initiative in the country to create EHRs of a population, linked with the HMIS (Health Management Information System) projects of all health institutions in the State.
The ₹96-crore project had been bagged by Kerala from the Union Electronics and Information Technology Department in 2013.
The e-health initiative has basically two arms — a public health component and a hospital automation module. The highlight will be the public health module, which will be launched across the State immediately. The latter is expected to be scaled up to seven districts in three months.
A central data server will hold the health data of all citizens, collected at all levels of interaction within the health system, including the data collected by the health field workers transmitted using hand-held devices.
Under the hospital automation module, all processes in government hospitals will be automated.
“The system will store the EHRs of all citizens who access the health system, each of whom will have a unique identity number, which we would prefer to be the Aadhaar. Sufficient privacy clauses have been incorporated,” chief consultant of the project Dilip Nair said.
