myCOL: Healthcare App to Make Hospitalization Easy

Nobody wants to feel sick. But we all fall sick some time or the other. Nobody wants to be admitted in a hospital. But when the need comes, we have to. Being in a hospital is already a painful and stressful scenario. But the hassle of finding a good hospital with good facilities and capable doctors, the long waits that are often involved in getting admitted into or discharged from a hospital, and the confusing paperwork that's needed to get your insurance claims cleared...all these make hospitalization even more stressful. Not just for the patient but also for their caretaker. Very recently, with the outbreak of Dengue in Delhi, patients being turned away from hospital because of lack of bed vacancy was a common sight and caused much distress. And yet, if there was some way that could inform the patients about a hospital that had vacant beds, this distress might have been lessened.

Well, I was recently informed about a website and app that seeks to reduce all these hassles and long waits so the caretakers and doctors can just concentrate on the patient. This is myCOL (Circle Of Life). The myCOL service and app have been launched by Circle of Life Healthcare Pvt. Ltd. myCOL offers a suite of services that can help patients and their caretakers. People can use it to search out a good specialized hospital in their vicinity. They can find out whether there's a vacant bed in that hospital. And they can also take advantage of a Personal Assistant who can take care of booking an appointment with the doctor and even help in getting the insurance claim documents ready. All this for free.

Talking about myCOL, Vaibhav Singh, Co-founder and CEO said, "Our vision is to democratize healthcare and remove the fear which patients and caretakers feel when approaching a hospital for an In-patient Procedure. myCOL combines the benefits of technology and human touch, to deliver a unique product to the services-starved patient."

myCOL service can be accessed from their website at http://www.mycol.in/. They have also launched an Android app and are soon to launch the app for iOS devices.

myCOL offers the users a database of hospitals and relevant information about these hospitals like contact details, timings etc. The Personal Assistant is to help the patient in taking care of all administrative works of hospitalization like booking an appointment, insurance coordination and discharge formalities. In addition, myCOL makes available a cloud space to store all the health records like prescriptions, invoices, insurance papers etc. This creates a sort of online medical repository from which individual documents can be easily shared with a doctor. myCOL also has an Reminder features that gives timely reminders of upcoming appointments with the doctors. Not just that, myCOL also allows users to create groups of family members and keep track of the health of the entire family.

As yet, the myCOL services are available only in Delhi/NCR. But it is soon to expand to other cities. As the service grows and builds up its database, it is sure going to be a helpful tool in reducing the hassles and tensions of hospitalization.

Important Links: myCOL Website myCOL Android App