AIIMS To Promote Use Of Ayushman Bharat Health Account For OPD Registrations

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences has decided to promote the use of the Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA) ID for the Out-Patient Department registration of new and follow-up cases.

According to an office memorandum issued on November 15, this will entail the adoption of the 'scan and share QR code' solution of the National Health Authority in all OPDs at AllMS to facilitate quick registration and provide a registration queue number to the patient on arrival.

Dedicated counters and kiosks shall be operated from at least 7 am to 10 pm to facilitate the creation of ABHA ID for patients without a smartphone. 

This project will be piloted in the new Rajkumari Amrit Kaur OPD from November 21 and shall be taken up in a mission mode from January 1 across all OPDs of AIIMS New Delhi.

"It has been noted that patients visiting AIIMS OPDs are standing in long queues for registration. Manual entry of patient demographics is being done for registration despite the availability of Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA) with many patients. 

"At the time of registration using ABHA ID OTP is often delayed. The maximum attempts to resend OTP is also limited to three times," the office memorandum read.

The scan and Share QR Code solution of the National Health Authority (NHA) has shown promising results in reducing the time taken for registration and has also helped in streamlining the patient journey on arrival at the hospital, the memorandum.

Also, the said solution is biometric and face-authentication enabled to allow sharing of ABHA ID details.

"Accordingly, it has been decided to promote the use of Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA) ID for OPD Registration of new & follow-up patients at AIIMS," the memorandum issued by AIIMS Director Dr. M Srinivas said.

To further enhance the use case of ABHA ID, QR Code-based sharing of digital health records of patients with healthcare professionals shall also be enabled by the use of 'Personal Health Record (PHR) applications, it said.

The memorandum said Hospitals shall also be integrated with the appropriate framework of NHA so as to allow patients to store their health records like prescriptions, lab reports, discharge summaries, vaccination records, etc. in the "Digilocker document wallet.

(Inputs from PTI)