Soon, you might be able to locate the hospital closest to you, or even a specialist doctor in your area on your mobile phone. The Central Bureau of Health Intelligence and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) are working on a portal and a mobile app that will help locate a hospital and a doctor within a couple of kilometres. The portal, called Bhuvan Sehat, and the app will be a first of its kind in the world, said D. Giri Babu, Head, Bhuvan Systems and Web Services, National Remote Sensing Centre, ISRO.
"The portal will have complete information about health resources and assets in the country. Once you log on to it, you will be able to look up a doctor, or a hospital, complete with its contact details. Such an exercise has not been attempted anywhere in the world," said Babu, who is working with a team of eight scientists at the ISRO office in Hyderabad.
The portal will provide single-window access to information about hospitals in both the government and the private sectors—it will give details about say, a cardiologist in your area, or even a blood bank, or a diagnostic lab closest to you. This will particularly be useful in case of an accident, or instances where say, a government hospital is in dire need of a specialist, said Babu.
In the next few weeks, field workers will be uploading data—including pictures from the sites—and uploading extensive details such as the number of beds in a hospital and doctors' qualifications on to the portal. Currently, there's no such database that maps the private sector hospitals in India, said Babu.
Deepak Goyal, Director (Statistics), Central Bureau of Health Intelligence, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare said that the portal would be ready by next year. By end of this month, the portal that is being developed under the ministry's National Health Resource Repository project, will be tested in five districts, said Goyal.
These five districts have been selected randomly in Gujarat, Sikkim, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and Rajasthan. The database will be comparable in scale to the population census of India, Goyal added.
