Telangana’s Health ATM Plan: Innovation with Challenges

The Telangana government has plans to install more Health ATMs at busy hospitals in the state to reduce the waiting time and cut down the queues at the reports block.  Health ATMs are diagnostic testing machines, which were installed in hospitals witnessing high footfall of outpatients. The Health ATMs will help the doctors in the pre-screening of outpatients. It was also found that the diagnostic accuracy of these machines is also significantly high.

The initiative has been tested on a pilot basis and officials said that there were positive results. The ATMs were launched in August 2025 at King Koti district hospital and Malakpet area hospital, which witness a very high of outpatients on a daily basis.  Each ATM can conduct 130 tests, including 65 non-invasive and 20 invasive (blood-based) tests.

The test reports are then integrated with the digital health records of the patients through cloud connectivity. To check the accuracy of the diagnostic reports of the Health ATMs in the pilot project, the hospital staff tested blood samples at T-Diagnostics and at private diagnostic centres simultaneously.

It was found that the ATMs were reliable as the results matched with those submitted by diagnostic centres. The results of the pilot project are encouraging as it practically helped in decongesting the patients’ rush in the hospital and reducing the waiting time. The integration of the diagnostic reports with the digital records was also done without any errors.

The initiative could also help the poor in cutting down on the expenses on diagnostic centres, as the Health ATMs would conduct the primary diagnosis, i.e. blood tests, almost free. At times, depending on the ATMs could also prove costly, if the results are not properly integrated with the patients’ records digitally.

As many of the patients visiting the government hospitals would be senior citizens, coordinating with them would also prove to be a challenge, given the condition that they are not tech-savvy.

As they would be ignorant of how the entire system works, they might not be able to understand the importance of some basic things necessary for the entire process to fall in place, which could prove to be a costly mistake and delay the exercise, instead of the desired cutting down the waiting time.

The staff at the state facilities should also be technically knowledgeable to keep the process smooth, else it could prove to be a disaster. If the machines stop working due to technical glitches too, the doctor consultation process would end up in a chaos.

In the wake of the possible problems that could crop up, the authorities should ensure that all measures are taken to make the Health ATMs are a success.