The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)-National Institute of Pathology (NIP), Delhi has catalogued diagnostic public healthcare facilities throughout the country and constructed a user-friendly and comprehensive dynamic online map to make available information of relevant laboratory services to users.
To avail the service — Diagnostic Services in Healthcare: Availability and Geo-mapping of Laboratory services in India (DISHA) —users can select the State for which diagnostic facility is being searched, select the district of that State, select if you are looking for a public or private facility and then the test that they are looking for.
Tweeting the launch, ICMR-NIP said: “this dynamic, free DISHA website that catalogues diagnostic public healthcare facilities across country will enable increased utilisation of public health services.”
Dr. Usha Agrawal, ex-director and Scientist-G, NIP noted that diagnostic healthcare services contribute significantly to the delivery of healthcare, adding that the Indian diagnostic healthcare system is vast and complex with numerous stakeholders, and is variably distributed in different geographical areas.
“The government has set guidelines for operation and quality of diagnostic public health facilities, however, currently, the country has no information on availability of tests, their costs, and infrastructure to gauge the effective utilisation of health services,” she said.
The ICMR noted that robust diagnostic healthcare services lay the foundation of an efficient, high-quality healthcare system and up to 60-70% of all critical healthcare decisions are based on the evidence provided by laboratory services.
Critical necessity
“Access to the information regarding the location and availability of the diagnostic tests is a critical necessity. In a country as vast as ours, we require the necessary resources to locate the laboratories which provide the required tests,” it said.
DISHA is aimed at enhancing accessibility to essential information and also enabling developing solutions for identifying and locating diagnostic healthcare services more effectively.
The service will be a free public resource for locating the nearest diagnostic health facilities enabling increased utilisation of public health services.
Additionally, areas with an imbalance between population densities and diagnostic facilities can be identified. The data would enable the public health experts and government policymakers to consolidate the diagnostic healthcare system by empowering the existing labs or creating new facilities where necessary, said the ICMR.
This web portal is a dynamic platform which is being updated with new data points as and when it had the access to required data, the ICMR added.
