Digitalization of Medical records

Problem Statement

Due to the lack of an organizing system for the patient’s hard form medical records & history, Patients are forced to keep a large stack of Paper records when doctors check patient’s history when they try to diagnose a problem.

Overview :

A medical history is like a story which tells the status of our health and can even predict the future. Every symptom, onset, illness, medications, diagnosis, past treatment plans are interdependent and are critical to patient care. In healthcare, it is believed that the efficacy of a treatment plan is directly dependent on the information a patient can divulge on his own medical history, but our documentation is largely dependent on our memories and at best on previous paper works, which largely compromises the accuracy of the history of health

The problem lies in the fact that we continue to remain dependent on paperwork to document our medical history, which can be messy and hard to maintain and sometimes it is lost. We need to store and carry paper reports every time we visit a physician. Sometimes there is a legibility issue of prescriptions and reports. Whenever a patient migrates from one physician/doctor to another, there is no comprehensive information for better understanding of patient’s history. There is also problem of finding the top rank and certified doctors of any specific disease due to lack of information and they have to rely on information provided by friends and relatives.

This project is a technological advancement in healthcare that does away with the traditional paper-based documentation of medical records. This project will help in digitizing medical records as this market is still untapped in Pakistan. The aim is to have digital version records and documents patient’s medical history and data gets added with every visit to a physician. It will provide you access to your complete history virtually, anytime, anywhere. Moreover it will be encrypted that patient will be able to see at which time and who is assessing it.

My Experience :

When I was collecting data for this project I surveyed 10 -15 doctors and 20 patients to have an idea about this. Patients & their caretakers said that they needed a platform to organized the records that are in hard form (prescription, medical history & analyses) . So all these things make a big folder which makes it difficult to carry from one place to another or from one doctor to another . while the doctors recommend that there should be single platform where the documents are scanned and stored in internet & can be recovered for analyses when needed. The survey that i did was through phone calls.

Challenges :

Patients were able to point out the fact that they needed a secure system which had strong privacy because they don't want their report or data to get public , except only seen by the professional.

Either a setup has to made at some hospitals which include WI-FI , computers etc., or have to use an online system like website of the service or an app that can be used .

My learning: The take away from this activity is that there is a need for such organizing platform that can do the work . There are mobile application and websites that can get appointment from a doctor or video call him/her for the prescription but there is no place for the patients to collect and keep their records in a place altogether .