BENGALURU: Several states are keen to build a database on the health history of their citizens, but developing a consent-based mechanism is the real challenge, according to an International Institute of Information Technology team that worked with Nimhans to develop Karnataka’s mental health repository, e-Manas.

“How do you get consent from patients belonging to different demographics? How to authenticate the information, is something that we are looking at,” said TK Srikanth, faculty-in-charge, Computing, at IIIT-Bangalore.

The team that developed e-Manas spoke about the challenges of developing the mental health repository and privacy issues related to health records at a webinar, ‘Design of e-Manas – Karnataka Mental Health Manage System’, on Monday.

In June, the Karnataka government launched e-Manas, a software that keeps records of every mental health professional and institution in the state and the medical history of patients who visit them. The initiative, seen as the first of its kind for any Indian state, mandates hospitals and doctors in the field of mental health to upload patient data on the e-Manas portal. Access to the patient’s record is given with explicit consent of the patient. As mental health is a sensitive issue, technologists involved in the project said the privacy aspect becomes all the more important. “Going forward, how we develop a patient’s consent to share the data will largely depend on how the Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 will roll out,” Srikanth said.

Divya Raj, the principal technical strategist at IIIT-B, said the process of developing a software to record mental health data was also a challenge because there were no good examples to follow. “Technology adoption in the public health space was quite challenging. Besides ensuring that health professionals enter the data without wasting much of their time, we had to also cater to a diverse ecosystem right from a big institution like Nimhans to district hospitals and community health centres,” Divya Raj said.