Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld, spoke to Dr. Saroj Gupta, Founder, MyDigiRecords, to figure out her success in creating a platform that addresses the complex issues of travelling with digital records across the world.
Health Records: Trends
Healthcare around the world is based on fragmented systems that leave individuals with major blind spots in the management of their health records. The result is billions of dollars go in medical waste each year due to inefficiency, overtreatment, or poor care or coordination. While individual countries vary in terms of digital health sophistication, nearly all recognise the importance of the digitalization of health records. For instance, during the 2022 budget session, the Government of India introduced a digital health ecosystem under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Health Mission (ABDM). There are multiple issues to be fixed in our healthcare system; it’s a combination of issues, including a lack of easy access to health records and a lack of health literacy.
Health records are extremely important. While conversations around this paperless route to storing health records started way before 2000, of late, health records have started to come into the spotlight. So what exactly do health records do for us? We have created so many silos that we are not even sure whether one record system talks to the other or not. And a lot of people are creating interoperability. What does that really mean? One system should be able to talk to another. When you go from one hospital to another and yet to another hospital, doctors are unable to see all of your health records collated from various sources, all because we have created so many silos. To solve this problem, we need to figure out a way. Digitalization needs to be introduced in such a way that people have access to their records, and when they go to the doctor, they should be able to have access to medical records from across hospitals. Whether they are travelling anywhere in the world, they should have access to their records through easy digitalization, as they can’t carry papers and folders. Either they carry folders or they carry their clothes. Healthcare records: Challenges
So when we talk about maintaining health records, they have always posed a challenge, both in the US and India. In the US, all health records are owned by doctors and providers. Patients in the US are completely without access to their medical records and must figure out how to access care as they move from hospital to hospital. In India, patients have all their health records in physical folders, some of them being totally clueless about what they are carrying in their hands. The folders became so big and bulky that a lot of times, when patients are going for consultations, they don’t even know whether those folders contain all the necessary medical documents or whether they may be missing out on certain records. It gets complicated for them because they assume the doctor will be able to see all of those folders when they visit. Additionally, they frequently lose those documents, and doctors don’t have any patient records. Even the doctors can’t be expected to be looking at so many documents as the workload is high, and they anyway have to attend to as many patients as they can. This will not just ease the workload of doctors by allowing them easy access to health records but also make it so much easier for them to easily understand their conditions, allowing for better health outcomes.MyDigiRecords
MyDigiRecords is a platform that allows users to integrate and manage their health records from various sources, including digitising paper records, seamlessly pulling in digital health records from other sources, or manually entering the user’s health information. It is capable of maintaining records of all immunisations as well as medication interactions, which can begin right from the prenatal stage. When we talk about prenatal, there are so many apps in the market that pregnant women download during their pregnancy journey; however, post-delivery, they tend to delete that app, thereby losing all the data they fed into it. People receive notifications and reminders of recommended immunisations based on government guidelines.
Through MyDigiRecords, we are attempting to construct a comprehensive narrative for the children and their parents. The app will prove to be a game changer in terms of helping maintain all data right from the start of the pregnancy journey to capturing all details of childhood immunisations and treatment well into adulthood. This can also help track any genetic conditions from either parent and predict any health conditions that the children may be likely to suffer from, so they can proactively take steps to take better care of their health before issues develop.
People will also be able to track all their medications, including over the counter and prescription drugs and even get notified of potential interactions and include alerts to curb overuse, all by leveraging AI. This will also help to reach out to a doctor well in time and help doctors understand better what medications can prove to be unsafe and accordingly chart out the treatment options. While just one sign can allow adding all members of the family, without their permission one can’t get access to their records. Safety and security of the records is our first priority and accordingly we ensure our systems are well secured. MyDigiRecords leverages end-to-end encryption, multi-actor authentication and we have strict adherence to data protection regulations of each country that we operate in.
As an innovative health-tech startup, MyDigiRecords is committed to transforming the way people manage their health data, empowering them to make better-informed decisions and improve health outcomes. We want to help the government in their plans to bring the country to total digitization of health records to help drive better healthcare for the people of India. MDR’s platform can positively impact the Indian healthcare system by improving data access, streamlining administrative processes, and enabling better-informed decision-making for healthcare providers and patients.
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