Patna: Health minister Mangal Pandey on Saturday launched an Android-based mobile application, Swashthya Seva Darpan, that would allow the health department keep track of government health facilities, including drug availability, functional and non-functional equipment at the facilities and ambulance availability among other things.

The block-level officers, officials associated with district resource centres, medical officer in-charge among others are supposed to feed data related to government facilities on a routine basis.

The idea is that the government is informed about the loopholes of the facilities concerned so that it can address those on a priority basis.

Pandey, while launching the application, said only government officials will initially be able to access the mobile application but within a month, it will be available on public domain and available for download on Google Playstore.

"We want to make things more transparent in the system. Earlier, no initiative had been taken to keep people in the loop about government events but now our government is taking steps to keep things in public domain so as to ensure people's participation in everything," he said.

Pandey said the health department will shortly come up with another application, Health Facility Tracker, through which residents will be able to know about their nearby health facilities, their distance from the place they are and ability to call up the doctor through the app. "The application is supposed to be launched within a month," said Pandey.

Health department sources said the Swashthya Seva Darpan app launched on Saturday can import information of the Sanjeevani software launched in 2014.

"Availability of drugs in a primary health centre, number of doctors available in a facility, how many patients a doctor has attended to at any government facility in a month - all these information are available on the Sanjeevani software, which would be made available on the Swasthya Seva Darpan application as well," said a senior health department official.

"The Swasthya Seva Darpan app has buckets of options for the user to choose from," the official added.