Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Disclaimer policy of ArogyaUDHC

Question from Shrikant Sawant: Can you elaborate the disclaimer policy of this model. For example: God forbid, but if a patient dies in this process, and because all the data is electronic, it is easily provable who had given the opinion and prescription, is there even a vague possibility that, we as technology providers or the doctors, be prosecuted?

Answer: The disclaimer is displayed once the patient hits on the 'add a health case' button (this button can be found anywhere on most of the website pages as well as on the home page). This is the page that opens up here:http://www.udhc.co.in/INPUT/care-seeker-input.jsp
(Scroll down to the bottom to see the disclaimer which is essentially the same information content on our informed consent form here:http://www.udhc.co.in/STATICS/docs/udhc-english.pdf)
However more than the above your point hints at deeper issues of medical cognition, medical uncertainty, evidence gaps and their challenges to having a completely transparent clinical workflow. Our patients die everyday (as in most places in the globe) and all of these dead patient-records are still open in our website and anyone (patient relatives and kin) can easily scrutinize and audit whatever went wrong. In most instances we are confident of the fact that we did our best and acted free of errors (as much as is expected from current humans). A transparent clinical workflow could even reduce the amount of law-suits to doctors as most problems (in mutual understanding that lead to lawsuits in the first place) happen due to information gaps that often go unaddressed and we believe these gaps can be addressed by information technology.

Coming to the other important issue of if our outputs to the patient can be misinterpreted (by patients and TCHEs) leading to fatal errors we make it a point to direct all our online outputs and communication to the primary physician in-charge of the patient (click here:http://www.udhc.co.in/SOLUTION/solutionList.jsp). In many instances when we are ourselves the primary physician to the patient our outputs are mostly in the form of paper based prescriptions (or paper notes from the file) which are simply uploaded by the TCHE to maintain informational continuity in the patient's journey(to help their health professionals understand how to better solve their problems).

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