A website to provide symptom-based medical information to the public to guide them to report to a hospital at the appropriate time was launched.
T.S. Chandrasekar, chairman and chief gastroenterologist, MedIndia Hospitals, said that during the COVID-19 pandemic, people were reporting to the hospital either too late, ignoring symptoms out of fear of visiting the hospital, or too early and unnecessarily for trivial symptoms out of anxiety. The hospital had launched a website — www.consultdocnow.com — that was a numerically linked, symptom-based health guide website to check health status.
“It serves as a guidance for the public to assess the severity of their symptoms. The website has in its repository nearly 700 symptoms. It ranks the symptoms numerically from 1 to 10, according to the severity and gravity in general, gastrointestinal, cardiac, respiratory and neurological disorders,” he said.
A search option was provided on the website for the public to know the severity and the grading of the symptoms they were suffering from. While a severity score of between 1 and 5 meant the person can observe and consult a doctor in case of persistent symptoms, a score between 6 and 9 meant planning an elective consultation. The person should meet a doctor at once without delay for a severity score of 10 and above, he explained.
Dr. Chandrasekar said the scores were designed by the medical team after systematic documentary search and practical experience.
