As part of its mandate to improve access to quality health care the NKC is exploring the possibility of creating, at the National level, a web based, secure electronic health care information network. A reliable, swift, real time health data collection system is essential to enhance the quality of health care delivery in India. Independent growth of health care delivery institutions could create multiple dissimilar standards of health data collection and dissemination which, due to lack of interoperability, would increase the cost of health care enormously. Several clinical and IT standards are available at this point such as Health Level 7 (HL7), Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), Digital Imaging Communications in Medicine (DICOM) etc. A Health Network therefore is urgently needed to preempt such problems that could arise in the near future.
As a first step, the NKC undertook to collect information on the clinical and IT standards that major health care institutions in the country are currently using or wish to use in the future. A questionnaire was circulated to all leading healthcare providers as well as medical colleges and research institutes in the country to gather information on essentially three aspects:
Number and type of institutions that have Health Information software.
Clinical and IT standards most commonly used and standards that institutions wish to recommend at the National level.
Problems with specific standards currently in use.
Maths and Science