Integrated Health Information Platform – Disease Surveillance

Table of Contents

Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP) under Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) was launched in 7 states.

It is real time, village wise, case based electronic health information system with GIS tagging which will help in prompt prevention and control of epidemic prone diseases.
It will provide near-real-time data to policy makers for detecting outbreaks, reducing the morbidity and mortality and lessening disease burden in the populations and better health systems.
The objective behind setting up IHIP was to enable creation of interoperable Electronic Health Records (EHRs) which can be made available and accessible throughout the country.
Information from other branches like tuberculosis control programme, maternal and child health programme and non-communicable disease programme also will be included in this platform.

Reducing Medical Errors – It provides a vehicle for improving quality and safety of patient care by reducing medication and medical errors.
Patient Involvement- It stimulates consumer education and patients’ involvement in their own health care.
Increases efficiency – by eliminating unnecessary paperwork and provides caregivers with clinical decision support tools for more effective care and treatment
Improves public health reporting and monitoring – by creating a potential loop for feedback between health-related research and actual practice. Further, it provides a basic level of interoperability among electronic health records (EHRs) maintained by individual physicians and organizations.
Technology in Healthcare – It facilitates efficient deployment of emerging technology and health care services and provides the backbone of technical infrastructure for leverage by national and State level initiatives

Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme is a disease surveillance scheme under National Health Mission, under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in India, assisted by the World Bank.
The scheme seeks to set up a Central Disease Surveillance Unit and a State Surveillance Unit in each State where data is collected and analyzed.
The IDSP portal is a one stop portal which has facilities for data entry, view reports, outbreak reporting, data analysis, training modules and resources related to disease surveillance.

While digitization of health records is a welcome step, there is a need to enhance research facilities to deal with new and emerging viral threats like Zika Virus, Nipah Virus etc.
Further, utilizing such technical advancements would entail a need for well trained and committed workforce who would regularly monitor the cases.