Last Monday at 11.45 a.m., a blip on the television screen in the well-lit waiting area of an NGO in Nanal Nagar ushered a sense of urgency in the workforce that caught other occupants of the room by surprise. A 40-year-old road accident victim at Osmania General Hospital (OGH) was at risk of losing a leg, and it was a race against time.
Within five hours, an implant was made available and surgery completed. In the run-up to the surgery since the accident, volunteers of the NGO Helping Hand Foundation (HHF) stationed at OGH were alerted, the patient shifted to the hospital, NGO’s senior staff about 10 km away alerted, doctor’s advice contemplated, funding for an implant mobilised and volunteers from OGH ventured out to purchase the implant.
Text and image communication that facilitated the exercise, notified by blips on a TV screen, was done at a control room that coordinates medical aid at 23 hospitals in Hyderabad — solely through WhatsApp.
“Our control room manages aid in primary, secondary and tertiary hospitals across the city. The communication is done through WhatsApp, and it has worked very well for us,” says Mujtaba Askari of HHF.
While mental health professionals believe WhatsApp and social media are driving youngsters to consultation rooms, its use as a tool for information-sharing during medical emergencies is growing. “Its features, including encryption, favour use for informal communication to facilitate faster emergency care. However, communication between doctors in a formal setting involving patient data is through internal communication systems,” says Imron Subhan, Head of Emergency Services at Apollo Hospitals.
Dr. Subhan cited instances of having received images or ECG data through WhatsApp that helped his staff prepare treatment before a patient arrived.
A study of over 500 consultations between emergency and consulting physicians in Turkey, published in 2016, found the social messaging platform an effective tool as it allowed large amounts of clinical and diagnostic data transfer.
That notwithstanding, some say WhatsaAp is not the best way to communicate during emergencies.
“The Siddipet accident involving four vehicles in May this year was all over WhatsApp, but it was a phone call from my superintendent that got me to the hospital in five minutes,” says K. Nagarjuna, Head of Pediatric Surgery at Gandhi Hospital. He adds WhatsApp was subsequently used for communication pertaining to the accident within his team.