Bhubaneswar: Several patients seeking appointment at premier hospitals in the state with the help of Union Health Ministry’s Online Registration System (ORS) are finding it not a healthy option as they have to face many offline hassles.
The system allows the patients to book appointment in respective departments of selected premier government hospitals from across the country including Odisha. However, the non-availability of payments options for Odisha hospitals is proving a bane for this innovative system.
Patients claim that with the non-availability of payment options, the ill, elderly and the women companions are bound to wait in queues for long hours to pay their hospital consultation and other fees. Interestingly, the consultation charges at many such hospitals are as low as Rs 10.
“I recently booked an online appointment in the cardiology department of AIIMS, Bhubaneswar through ORS. The next day, I was given the time slot at 7:30am. I went to the hospital on time. Despite my online appointment, I had to stand for one-and-half hours to pay Rs 10,” said RV Singh, a sexagenarian heart patient.
He also said that while he arrived at the hospital at 7:30am, he could finally get to see the doctor at 5:30pm that day, after a gap of 10 hours, thanks to the half-baked ORS and the large crowd at AIIMS, Bhubaneswar.
Currently, the ORS accepts only payments of booking appointments at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, AIIMS-Rishikesh (Uttarakhand) and NIMHANS, Bangalore, for those patients who feed their Aadhaar details in the portal and verify it with the onetime password. Not a single hospital in Odisha as listed in the ORS portal accepts payments for their online appointments through the portal. Such absence of online payments systems mandates the patients to again take the long route of standing in queues.
Some patients claim the online payment queues are longer than the offline mode, leading to more problems for the people who book online.
“In hospitals like AIIMS, Bhubaneswar, the single line allowing payment for online appointments are often the longest. Those trying offline modes directly stand in the line, get their appointment and payments from the single source, said Kedar Nath, another patient from the city who has used offline mode to book appointment at AIIMS.
He, however, accepted the fact that in offline mode several times, the appointments are not available after certain seat limits, making many of them lose the day. Currently, the ORS portal allows online booking for four government hospitals in Odisha-AIIMS-Bhubaneswar, Acharya Harihar Regional Cancer Centre (Cuttack), SVP PG Institute of Paediatrics (Cuttack) and the Swami Vivekananda National Institute of Rehabilitation, Training and Research.
