In a move to benefit its patients from across India, the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research, Puducherry, launched an online registration facility on Friday.
The online patient registration system aims at reducing the waiting time for the nearly 8,000 patients who reach the outpatient department (OPD) at JIPMER every day.
With this, JIPMER has joined seven other hospitals in India under the Online Registration System (ORS-an initiative of the Digital India programme), a framework linking hospitals in an Aadhaar-based system through the ORS Patient Portal.
“JIPMER is going digital, joining other nationwide initiatives under the Digital India programme”, said S.C. Parija, Director, JIPMER, at the launch of the online patient registration system.
The main objective is to enable anyone anywhere to register anytime, said Dr. Parija, adding that the system takes only a couple of minutes to register a patient. “The initiative is a bid to make services at JIPMER more patient-friendly,” he said.
As a majority of the patients were poor and might not be digitally literate, JIPMER would be tying up with self-help groups to facilitate online registration among patients, said Dr. Parija. He clarified that the online patient registration system did not entail any specific privileges but eliminated the need for waiting for registration. Those who registered online would have a separate counter to get their OPD appointments.
Each patient who registered online would be assigned a unique identification number. Initially, the facility would be open to new patients and this would later be extended to existing case files as well, said Anita Rustogi, Additional Medical Superintendent and officer-in-charge of Medical Records Department, JIPMER. Of the nearly 8,000 OPD patients a day, some 2,500 were new patients, she said.
Plans for mobile app
The system is equipped with an SMS gateway so patients get confirmation of their registration as a text message. There are plans to expand the online registration process with a mobile application.
J. Balachander, Medical Superintendent, JIPMER, outlined the ongoing shift to digital initiatives such as the use of electronic health records, digital CT scan reports, laboratory and X-ray reports, saying that doing away with X-ray sheets had resulted in huge savings. The reports could be accessed by all doctors, reducing delay in treatment, he also said.
The link to the ORS Patient Portal is available on the JIPMER websitewww.jipmer.edu.in
