ELECTRONIC DATABASE
Med records at civic hosps will soon be a click away …..Kumar Sambhav I TNN
Mumbai: In a move to boost its egovernance plan, the BMC is planning to link all its hospitals and healthcare centres through a computerised network. Medical records of patients treated at any civic hospital will thus be available at the click of a mouse.
Moreover, patients will not have to wait in long queues for registration when referred from one public hospital to another.
“An ID will be allotted to a patient during his/her first-time admission to BMC hospitals. The records of his diagnosis and treatment will be stored on this ID. When he/she visits the same hospital the next time or is referred to another one, he/she will only have give the ID number and his/her medical history will appear on the computer screen,’’ said a high-ranking civic official.
BMC runs four teaching hospitals, five specialty hospitals, 16 peripheral hospitals, 24 maternity homes, 162 dispensaries and 168 health posts. The e-system, if implemented, will allow aggregating the information from all these hospitals to a centralised database.
“All the work that is done manually in the civic-run hospitals will be computerised in a phased manner. These local networks will then be connected to a central data centre located in Worli,’’ said additional commissioner Anil Diggikar.
The computerised database will make it easy to compute data about diseases and facilitate better coordination between hospitals. Epidemics—say, an outbreak of fever or malaria—can be detected immediately, said officials.
Sources said the hospital management software is ready. “All the staff members, starting from nurses to doctors, will be trained for this software. Within two years, we will have 6,000 new computers and an equal number of trained users,’’ they added.
The software—costing around Rs 5 crore—will incorporate every aspect of healthcare, including registration, pharmacy, blood banking and causalty. A pilot project in a few teaching hospitals may start soon. “We expect the whole network to be ready within two years,’’ civic officials added.