Patients suffer as offline payments consume hours
Irfan Tramboo
Srinagar, Mar 5: The authorities at Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS), Soura have failed in implementing the online payment gateway which was meant to be put in place to facilitate the payments in the Out Patient Department (OPD) due to which the patients, as well as their attendants, are facing a tough time.
Due to the non-functioning of the gateway, people are left with no option but to stand in long queues where they end up waiting for hours together till their turn of making the payments offline finally arrives.
“I have reached here around 10 in the morning and was finally able to make the payment for an X-ray after one and a half hours, and then there was another wait of nearly 2 hours to get the X-ray done; so much time gets consumed here daily,” Zahid Bhat, one of the attendants said.
Another attendant, Abdul Rahim from north Kashmir’s Sopore, who had to make payments for a few diagnostic tests, said that he happened to see a poster about the option of the availability of online payments for the investigations.
“But when I logged on to the website, I was asked to enter the patient ID, which I had, and then it asked to enter the order number, which I didn’t have; thus, I was not able to make the payment and joined the endless queue where I was able to make the payment after nearly an hour,” he said.
Due to the non-availability of online payment options, the OPD of SKIMS remains congested and what is seen are endless queues in front of the payment counters just at the entry.
SKIMS has already put in place the online system for booking appointments with the doctors in a different department and that initiative along with the module for downloading the patient reports—which is also working effectively—has made a great change on the ground and has also reduced the rush of patients in these sections while making it easy for them.
The need for having an option of online payments was also felt by the SKIMS in January last year after Director Prof. Parvaiz A Koul underlined the need for having it to decongest critical hospital service areas, particularly the OPD area.
It was stated that the implementation of the Online Payment Gateway System at SKIMS will facilitate patients and it was given out that the set-up will make the entire process convenient for patients as well as their attendants. The concerned IT Department was also instructed to explore the possibility of implementing the PayGo Payment Gateway of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Govt of India—which is a National Payment Platform—as used by AIIMS New Delhi.
But due to some issues which the SKIMS administration is facing, the payments gateway has not been so far implemented, which is furthering the issues faced by the people who throng the OPD daily.
Medical Superintendent, SKIMS Dr Farooq Jan told Excelsior that they are trying to find out a way for the effective and better implementation of the payment gateway to facilitate the patients and decrease the rush further.
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