By Joseph Varghese
Staff Reporter

The Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC) aims to enhance patient safety through the 'My Health' programme, a digital health platform for all healthcare providers and patients, a senior official has said.
Dr. Mohamed Bekhiet, the executive director of Operations, PHCC said that the programme focuses on healthcare facilities and end users of these facilities. He was speaking at the 'Thinking Session' organised by PHCC at Millennium Hotel on Tuesday.
Dr. Bekheit noted that through the programme, the healthcare providers will be able to ensure patient safety to a large extent. He explained “The physicians can access the health records across the organisations in the public sector now using the digital platform of Clinical Information System. This provides all the information about the patient and their past medical history. Therefore, the doctors will be able to judge the health of the patient according to the past history and can provide the right diagnosis.”
He continued, “Now this facility is available only between the public healthcare providers. Later, all the private sector providers also will be included in the programme and a very comprehensive medical data will be available to any physician about a patient in the country.”
The official also said that there is a facility for the patients to access the medical records “The patients can create a personal account by providing the necessary details using the Qatar Digital Government platform. They can access all their medical data including the appointments as well as the history of the examination. All this information will give the current state of the health of the patient. In addition, the family members’ medical records also can be linked to the same account as it has the provision for adding four more records to the account.” he added.
Maryam Yaseen al-Hammadi, executive director, Corporate Communication, PHCC said at the meeting that its call centre system 'Hayak 107' has gone for a revamp as it has become part of the government portal of ictQatar.
She explained. “Earlier we had only about seven health centres in the call centre system Hayak 107. Now there are 12 centres in the programme. Since August 23, the call centre works 24x7 all through the week.”
“There were about 161,315 calls from March to September this year, out of which 100,441 were answered. After the services were handed over to the government call centre recently, the services have improved greatly. Now the services are available for 12 health centres in five languages.”
The official pointed out that the services available through Hayak 107 are, general inquiries, booking appointments, appointment rescheduling, appointment cancellation and receiving complaints. She also added that a recent survey about the PHCC services in some of the health centres pointed to a very high level of satisfaction of its services from the public.