App to help citizens avail Covid treatment

Digital platform shares information on available beds, ventilators in nearby hospitals

LAHORE: The Punjab government has developed a mobile phone application that helps citizens ascertain the availability of beds and ventilators for novel coronavirus patients in 249 public and private hospitals in all the 36 districts of the province.

There are at least 9,037 beds and 763 ventilators in isolation wards and other facilities in the hospitals.

This app can be downloaded from the website of the Punjab Primary and Secondary Healthcare Department.

Through the app, citizens can immediately get information about vacant beds and ventilators, district wise, in all teaching, field, tehsil and district headquarters hospitals, quarantine centres and private hospitals.

Punjab Health Minister Dr Yasmeen Rashid is supervising the operation of the app.

Speaking to the media regarding the app, she said it had also been linked with the Rescue-1122 service.

Therefore, the suspected patients and their families should contact Rescue 1122 instead of going to the hospitals, she added.

Rescue 1122 teams will reach the home, install the app and inform the patient's family about the availability of beds and ventilators at the nearest public and private hospitals, she explained. “And in consultation with the patient and his family, the patient will be taken to the nearest public or private hospital.”

The app can be downloaded by any person, but the people should take advantage of the services of Rescue 1122, which would be convenient for the patient suffering from coronavirus, she further said. “First, they will be able to check the availability of beds and ventilators and then use the free of charge ambulance of Rescue 1122 with all the medical facilities.”

This application would help provide relief to the patients and prove to be a great achievement of the government in public service, she remarked.

Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) officials said the services for running the app had been acquired from Google as its search engine was quite useful for the purpose. “No matter how many people and sectors use it, no error has been reported.”

However, service malfunctions could be caused by any reason, especially overload, the officials added.

They further said that efforts had been made to develop the Health Information System app while fulfilling all modern requirements. “The application has been developed by the PITB on the directives of the government.”

However, a shortcoming of the application is that all its instructions are in English language only, due to which a large segment of the society would find it difficult to benefit from it.

Also, a large number of people having low income, especially in the underdeveloped districts, are not able to afford smartphone that are required to use the app. In many areas of at least 23 districts of the province, even the basic necessities are not available and a number of people don’t use modern communication technology.

Thus, the use of the app is likely to the limited to a few urban areas of Punjab that already have a wide range of medical facilities available while around half of the province’s population would struggle to benefit from it. This could mean that the underprivileged population of Punjab, estimated to be around 40 million, would need additional support from the government amid the pandemic.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 17^th, 2020.