Strive for full digitization of health services: Chief Secretary

Jammu, Dec 3: Chief Secretary, Atal Dulloo Tuesday held a meeting of Health & Medical Education (H&ME) Department to take assessment of the measures taken under Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) to ensure secure and hassle-free availability of services under this initiative.
Besides the Secretary H&ME, the meeting was attended by MD NHM; Principals of Medical Colleges; Director Health Services Kashmir/Jammu and other concerned officers.
The Chief Secretary emphasized upon the Department to make best out of ABDM in creating a system to digitize the services offered by the Health Department. He called for digitization of health records in a safe and secure manner besides focusing on developing Electronic Health Records (EHR) for safeguarding these for posterity.
He maintained that such an exercise would be highly beneficial for the medics in proper diagnosis based upon the history of the patient and earlier treatments received by him/her. He directed for sending bulk SMSes to the people creating awareness about the benefits of ABHA to them.
He urged the Department to simultaneously take measures for periodical updation of registries of health institutions and health professionals here along with their availability and kind of medical/diagnostic services offered by each of them.
The Chief Secretary also emphasised upon covering all OPD admissions under ABDM. He asked for extending QR code based registrations to other hospitals in addition to those it has already been introduced in. He advised for moving towards creating EHR of patients that is the ultimate objective of the mission to make healthcare providing a paperless exercise.
While giving overview of the functioning of this mission the Secretary, H&ME, Dr Syed Abid Rashid Shah gave out that the main building blocks of ABDM comprises creation of ABHA IDs of the population here besides generating a repository of both health practitioners and institutions in the shape of Health Professionals Registry (HPR) and Health Facility Registry (HFR) respectively.
It was further revealed that till now nearly 90,90,802 ABHA ids had been created for the targeted population of around 1.36 Cr. Moreover the HFR contains all public health facilities and empanelled private institutions also.
Similarly the HPR contains records of 6448 doctors and 4488 nurses working here. It was added that 105 health facilities are extending scan & share facility for OPD admissions thereby generating 53,99,189 tokens till date.
Regarding the introduction of M.Sc Nursing course in the colleges of J&K, the meeting was apprised that 25 seats are available in Government Nursing College Srinagar which had been filled by BOPEE here.
It was further disclosed that the introduction of M.Sc Nursing course in the Nursing College at Jammu would be taken up with the University here after passing out of the first batch of Post Basic B.Sc Nursing here.
Regarding the seat matrix it was given out that the UT offers 233 seats of M.Sc Nursing cumulatively in its 8 institutions established here in public and private sector.
Similarly 49 Nursing Colleges offer 2885 seats, 19 Paramedical institutions offer 1660 seats and 6 B-Pharma institutions had an intake capacity of 373 candidates for this course.
As far as the admissions are concerned it was informed that out of 233 M.Sc Nursing seats, 206 had been filled till now. In the same vein 3150 B.Sc Nursing seats, 334 B.Pharma seats and 627 B.Sc Paramedical seats had been filled by the professional board and for left over seats by these professional institutions themselves here.