Digitise Healthcare Slowly

Context: The implementation of Digital Health ID project (DHID) have both aspects, pros as well as cons.

Significance of Digital Health ID Project (DHID)

• Objective: To “improve the quality, access and affordability of health services” by making the service delivery “quicker, less expensive and more robust”.
• Improve the quality of healthcare: By reducing the carrying and storing medical documents of patients, it gives quick access of patients’ history to the doctors for more accurate diagnosis and treatment.
  • It also reduces re-testing problems every time a patient consults a new doctor.
• Invaluable for clinical and operational research: Well organised repositories of medical records can stimulate much-needed research on medical devices and drugs.
• Promotes paperless facilities: By direct electronic linkages among all, the pharmacy is enabled to use relevant information of patients to keep the medicines ready and reduce delays.
• Electronic mapping of providers: It may enable patients to spot a less busy doctor near their location.

Challenges in DHID

• Administrative costs will increase by 20% due to the capital investment in hardware and software development, technical personnel and data entry servers. It will also add care costs up to 2%.
• Lack of digital infrastructure in remote areas: It will make unable to synchronise biometric data with ID cards and result in large-scale exclusions of the poor from welfare projects.
• Information Gap: The efficacy of the DHID hinges on the assumption that every visit and drug consumed by the patient is accurately recorded. With the digitised records virtually “speaking” for the patient, information gaps can be problematic.
• Teleconsultation may be helpful in managing minor diseases but is unable to handle chronic diseases. It will also be unable to manage the high attrition rate of doctors within the context of an overall shortage of doctors and basic infrastructure.
• High possibility of hacking and breaching confidentiality: The possibility of privacy being violated increases with the centralisation of all information.

Way Forward: Instead of a big bang approach, it is better to go slow and steady, testing the waters as we go along to make DHID sustainable and acceptable with the aim to achieve this aspiration within the next decade or two. That’s the only way to ensure that a good policy does not die along the way due to poor implementation.