Leah So­rias

T&T's pub­lic health­care sys­tem will go hi-tech by late next year with the launch of the E-Health Card. Ac­cord­ing to Health Min­is­ter Jer­ry Narace, the card would be made avail­able to the pub­lic by the third of fourth quar­ter of next year and by 2012, every cit­i­zen should have the card. He said the project was list­ed at the top of the min­istry's agen­da for next year. The elec­tron­ic card, Narace not­ed, would make it eas­i­er for cit­i­zens to bet­ter ac­cess health­care abroad and would al­so pro­vide ac­cess to on­line med­ical records, ap­point­ment sched­ul­ing and lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al test records.

The card would al­so mon­i­tor the Chron­ic Dis­ease As­sis­tance Pro­gramme (CDAP), he said. "The project will start on a pi­lot ba­sis in March and then it will be rolled out to the en­tire coun­try by the third or fourth quar­ter of next year," Narace said, dur­ing a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day. "This is in­tend­ed to be the first re­al ma­jor trans­for­ma­tion tool in health­care," he added.

He ex­plained that the card would al­low peo­ple to vis­it a physi­cian or phar­ma­cy and in­stead of fill­ing out forms, their health records could be ac­cessed with just a swipe of the card. Narace said through the E-Health Card, pa­tients would be iden­ti­fied and the health­care en­counter would be val­i­dat­ed in quick time. He not­ed that with the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the card, wait­ing time at in­sti­tu­tions and doc­tors would be de­creased.

?About the E-Health Card

Once reg­is­tered, pa­tients will be able to ac­cess providers' avail­abil­i­ty, ros­ters, ser­vices on-line and book ap­point­ments. Those who do not have ac­cess to the In­ter­net can call a toll-free num­ber to ob­tain an ap­point­ment and the in­for­ma­tion will be up­dat­ed on the sys­tem. All ap­point­ments and re­minders will be com­mu­ni­cat­ed au­to­mat­i­cal­ly to the pa­tient us­ing e-mail or text mes­sag­ing.

Once at the fa­cil­i­ty, the pa­tient will present the E-Health Card to the clerk, who would con­firm iden­ti­ty, and re­trieve the pa­tient's files. Once treat­ment is com­plete, the pa­tient's records will be up­dat­ed, com­plete with the physi­cian's re­port, im­ages and lab re­sults.