A few months ago, a 70-year-old former smoker was referred for a CT scan guided lung nodule biopsy. I thought the nodule looked benign and non-cancerous, but had no prior scans or radiographs to compare. My coordinator kept insisting the patient and his relatives to check old reports. They kept saying they didn’t have any. Finally, the day before the biopsy, the daughter-in-law came in as part of a pre-operative work-up for gall bladder surgery with a chest X-ray done 10 years earlier. The same nodule I had to biopsy was present in that 10-year-old chest X-ray…unchanged. Any lung nodule that remains the same for more than two years is considered benign and is best left alone. When I told this to the patient and his family, they were overjoyed… from a possible lung cancer, the diagnosis had changed to… “nothing unusual to worry about”.
If only we had a system that would automatically alert us all to the presence of their 10-year-old’s chest X-rays. The patient could have been saved from a week’s worth of emotional and mental trauma as well as a CT scan, a PET/CT and consultation fees of two senior doctors, costing around Rs 40,000 and stress.
A system that maintains electronic health records is commonly called an EHR system for short. For the past two decades, smart engineers and doctors have banged their heads trying to create EHR systems that work well. While writing code and creating a working EHR is not that difficult, the challenge is the widespread adoption of similar EHRs and interconnections for different EHRs and sharing of data and information.
We have a good EHR in our practice and we can easily get the records of all our patients which are six years and sometimes even older but if the patient/person stayed in another clinical center or hospital in the interim So, we’re back to square one. There has been no grid or network in the past that would have allowed the EHRs of different hospitals and diagnostic centers to talk to each other.
So far…
Few months back, ABDM – Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission was launched. ABDM now gives every Indian citizen a unique health ID called ABHA (Ayushman Bharat Health Account), which is an electronic repository of all your health records. If you allow your doctor or hospital to view your Health ID (and permission may be date based and exclude records you do not want them to see), the doctor/hospital can view your health status and report Will be able , ABDM already has an Android app and built in API, which allows other existing EHRs to easily send and retrieve data from your Health ID… as long as our developers can connect to ABDM and your Health ID can be accessed.
If ABDM succeeds, it will be a huge game-changer, especially for a country like ours with limited resources. Although we still haven’t been able to offer public screening for something as simple as Fasting Plasma Glucose (FPB) For our entire population above the age of 20 or 30, each time an opportunistic FPB test is performed in the future, the result will automatically be available in your Health ID record. Even if you don’t know the importance of your test results, eventually ABDM will be able to implement simple electronic rules or artificial intelligence (AI) based solutions that flag abnormal results (without invading privacy) and will send you an alert on the phone. I urge you to see your doctor or health worker or health coach, through app or SMS.
This will enable us to keep better records at the national and state levels and improve our ability to better determine the incidence and prevalence of disease and to allocate resources and other disease and other diseases needed to plan both preventive and therapeutic interventions at the population level. Will allow to get health data. ,
ABDM will work only when more and more people start presenting their ABHA ID when they visit doctors or diagnostic centers or hospitals and also when all stakeholders (doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, pharmacies, laboratories) submit their ABHA ID to ABHA. Let’s start incorporating into the software.
I believe each of us should get our own aura/health ID as soon as possible. It’s easy and takes about 5 minutes abdm site, If you have been vaccinated after May/June 2021, chances are you already have a Health ID number on your vaccination certificate, so all you need to do is visit the site, re-verify and enter a name. To claim like abcxyz @abdm.
In short, Health ID / Aura, by providing us the means to maintain our records without the headache of having to upload them ourselves and alerting us to potential conditions and ultimately giving us more to monitor our health. Giving ammunition will help us in our self healthy long search health period and lifetime. It may take a few years, but when it finally reaches a critical stage, it will be a big game-changer for everyone… you, the treating doctor, the hospital and the health officials.
Disclaimer
The views expressed above are those of the author.
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