Date:22/09/2006 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2006/09/22/stories/2006092205390500.htm

Karnataka - Bangalore

First government `paperless' hospital soon

Sahana Charan

MODERN: Computerisation has been put in place at the SDS Tuberculosis and Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases in Bangalore. — Photo: K. Murali Kumar

Bangalore: Patients going to the SDS Tuberculosis and Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases will not have to fill up laborious admission forms or wait for long to be allotted beds in the hospital wards. Soon the institute will become the first "paperless" Government hospital in the State.

According to hospital authorities, all the administration work, from registration to generation of a discharge summary, will be computerised by the second week of October.

The hospital is connected with 18 computers and registration, patient records, billing, accounting, drugs procurement, laboratory services, indenting and medical stores are being computerised. Moreover, all the medical and paramedical staff in the hospital are being trained to use the computers, and safety mechanisms have been put in place so that valuable information is not tampered with.

"We had computerised registration, billing and medical supplies sometime ago, but each section was functioning independently. But now we are linking all the sections so that there will be information flow and there will be no need to maintain manual records. Four computer operators have been sanctioned by the Government for this," said Shashidhar Buggi, director of the institute.

Dr. Buggi added that the software was recently upgraded and every month Rs. 6,000 from the user charges collected from patients would be spent on maintenance of the system.

Bion Computers is implementing the project for the Government.

Dr. Buggi said that details about bed availability in the wards, admission and discharge of patients would be stored in the computer. Every nurse station would have a computer and the nurse on duty would be able to check which bed was vacant and in which ward a patient could be admitted. The system would be linked in such a way that unless the accounts for a particular patient were in order, a discharge summary would not be generated.

The project to computerise the TB Sanatorium is part of a larger plan to introduce information technology-enabled services in all the five Government hospitals affiliated to the Bangalore Medical College — Victoria Hospital, Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospital, Vani Vilas Hospital, Minto Ophthalmic Hospital and SDS Tuberculosis and Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases.

Funds

According to sources in the Medical Education Directorate, the project for computerising all the teaching hospitals was sanctioned in 2001, and around Rs. 1 crore was allocated. But apart from the TB Sanatorium, the project did not see the light of day in any of the other institutions, including the directorate itself.

An official from the directorate said the Government was in the process of computerising and linking the Directorate of Medical Education to the five hospitals, so that a central system in the directorate would allow access to various patient information and financial transactions in each of these hospitals at the click of the mouse. The computerisation of the TB sanatorium was taken up as a pilot project and based on the success there the project would be implemented in other hospitals.