Abstract
Health is an individual’s most precious asset and healthcare is one of the vehicles for preserving it. The Indian government’s spend on healthcare system is relatively low (1.2% of GDP). Consequently, Secondary and Tertiary government healthcare centers in India (that are presumed to be of above average ratings) are always crowded. In Tertiary healthcare centers, like the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS), patients are often unable to articulate their problems correctly to the healthcare center’s reception staff, so that these patients to be directed to the correct healthcare department. In this paper, we propose a system that will scan prescriptions, referral letters and medical diagnostic reports of a patient, process the input using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engines, coupled with image processing tools, to direct the patient to the most relevant department. We have implemented and tested parts of this system wherein a patient enters his symptoms and/or provisional diagnosis; the system suggests a department based on this user input. Our system suggests the correct department 70.19% of the time. On further investigation, we found that one particular department of the hospital was over-represented. We eliminated the department from the data and performance of the system improved to 92.7%. Our system presently makes its suggestions using random forest algorithm that has been trained using two information repositories-symptoms and disease data, functional description of each medical department. It is our informed assumption that, once we have incorporated medicine information and diagnostics imaging data to train the system; and the complete medical history of the patient, performance of the system will improve further.
Highlights
India ranked 143rd among the 188 countries evaluated on 33 health-related SustainableDevelopment Goal (SDG) indicators [1]
We propose a system that will scan prescriptions, referral letters and medical diagnostic reports of a patient, process the input using OCR
Secondary and Tertiary healthcare centers require a referral from a Primary healthcare center
Summary
India ranked 143rd among the 188 countries evaluated on 33 health-related Sustainable. The healthcare center’s reception staff is often the first port of call and these staff often quickly browse through the medical documents of a patient to identify the appropriate department; this is not foolproof and mistakes are often made, leading to inconveniences for all parties concerned. This is a major bottleneck, especially as the system must deal with many thousands of patients each day. It was our conclusion that we need to first augment the manual appointment booking process to identify the correct department, thereby making the overall booking process easier and error free for the patients.
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