You can get your Covid test report via SMS from Tuesday, with state Health Secretary Nitin Kulkarni directing all district deputy commissioners to operationalise the system within the next 24 hours.

Timely testing is important and so is the timely availability of results, Kulkarni said to deputy commissioners on Monday in a letter seen by The Telegraph Online. An SMS is delivered to the person whose sample is collected through the RT-PCR machine, according to the top government official. But there is, at present, no mechanism to provide results of the test through SMS and in some instances, people had to wait for a few days to get information about their Covid-19 results.

The health department with National Informatics Centre (NIC) has developed a solution to send out results to the person concerned through SMS, who has undergone Covid-19 tests along with an option to print out the result report, Kulkarni said in the letter.

Deputy commissioners have been directed to activate a team in each and every district for proper functioning of the SMS system. Integrated Disease Surveillance Program (IDSP) units of each district are to get in touch
with their respective district information officer for getting the login credentials. The district IDSP team will compile the entire list of the testing results sent to them by the government and private laboratories and by the state in case of any outsourced samples, the letter said.

Since conduct of tests and communication of results is a continuous process, in order to ensure seamless and timely communication, it is advisable to populate the portal with available reports in desirable format twice a day i.e at 10AM and at 8PM everyday, the state Health secretary directed.

The district TB officer will send the compiled report of all TrueNat tests done in the specified format to the district IDSP by 10AM and 8PM everyday. The district IDSP will compile all the reports of the Rapid Antigen Tests, TrueNat and from the private labs in the specified format on a daily basis keeping in view of the above mentioned timelines.

Kulkarni cautioned that utmost care needs to be taken while compiling the data as any wrong information may create confusion and a chaotic situation. The respective district information officer, who has been given the task to verify the files for any format errors that are submitted by the IDSP, shall facilitate the data correction. If required, two people from each district IDSP can be trained in this regard either by the respective district information officer or by the state NIC.

Asking deputy commissioners to personally monitor the progress in the initial days, Kulkarni directed them to constitute a dedicated team of two or three persons for smooth functioning and delivering of the results via SMS on a large scale.