With the objective of improving health care access in remote villages, the Directorate of Public Health plans to issue smart cards to every woman who registers herself in the Primary Health Care (PHC) center.
“Sometimes, when we ask the people of a particular village to come to a PHC, it may be inconvenient for them. Though their village falls within the functioning area of the PHC, it might be far from their homes,” Director of Public Health P. Padmanabhan said. “With a smart card, they need not let distance come in the way of accessing health care. Take the card to any health centre close by and be treated or get a vaccine,” he told The Hindu.
As Doug points out in his earlier post, smart cards, despite having tremendous potential in the delivery of government services, has huge costs attached to it. The costs will only justify the benefits if a common smartcard platform is used to deliver multiple services. In this case, the use of smartcard will be more efficient if it is used to deliver all government programs in the geography rather than only focusing in healthcare.
Smartcards as a delivery tool, is a great example of technology put into use for development. However, it will be a shame if use of smartcards is discontinued simply because we have not been able to use it efficiently.
1 comments:
Smartcards and healthcare are definitely a combination, which has been tried and been successful in some countries. Cost of smartcard and its rollout is minuscule compared to health or life of the cardholder. The card can not only be used as access to healthcare services but it can also store critical emergency health related data on card. In rural areas, where doctor(s) per capita is low, healthcare and test facility few, the importance and value of card storage system grows. Softanicca LLC has developed an application to store and view the patient's emergency card record on a smartcard.
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