BMC's health care set-up to go paperless

In a relief to over half a lakh patients seeking treatment in civic hospitals, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is set to make its functioning paperless. Up to 54,000 patients throng the corridors of civic hospitals, dispensaries and health posts daily.

Patient data, medical education and public health information will be available at the click of a mouse in three medical colleges (KEM, Nair, Sion), five specialty hospitals, 18 peripheral hospitals, 28 maternity homes, 161 dispensaries and 168 health posts across Mumbai.
Currently, any patient wanting treatment has to make case papers to seek consultation in the outpatient department. The patient has to carry physical prescriptions, laboratory results for medical tests, X-ray, CT scan or MRI images to different departments or various hospitals.

BMC officials say this inconvenience will soon be a thing of the past. Additional civic commissioner (eastern suburbs) SVR Srinivas told dna, “Each patient will be allotted a unique identification number in the BMC hospital s/he approaches. Thereon, all test results, case papers, and diagnostic imaging results will be stored in a centralised computerised system. This is to avoid repetitive drudgery for the patients, who have to carry their records from one department to other within a hospital or between two or more hospitals or dispensaries.”
Up to 5,000 computers will have to be installed to render the paperless system functional in BMC's health care set-up.

BMC officials are mulling on the design of the unique patient ID. “We have received various options from the vendors, including an ID card and a hand band. Scanning of the band by the doctor or the pharmacist will provide all information of that patient to the hospital s/he is in,” said a senior BMC official from the IT department.
“In case of an emergency, if the patient does not remember the unique ID or loses the band, information of can be retrieved through his/her cell phone number or date of birth. All vital patient data will be linked for easy retrieval.”

Srinivas said the project, budget for which is close to Rs100 crore, will go live in the next six to eight months and will be implemented in a phased manner throughout the city. “Within two years, the entire BMC health care set-up, including patient treatment, medical education and public health infrastructure, will be computerised,” he said.
Apart from helping patients, it will enable strengthening of medical education. “Student doctors will be able to access live patient case scenarios from the data. Also, payment of fees, announcement of results and study material will be available on the network,” said Srinivas.

A committee of five doctors has been empaneled to conduct feasibility studies of the requirements of the hospitals while implementing the massive IT exercise. The tender was floated by the civic body last October and two IT companies were shortlisted this January. Of the two, the vendor which submits the lowest bid will be finalised.
A step towards e-governance, the BMC envisages making functioning of every employee in the health set-up paperless. “Estimating the current data load of medical records, administrative data from the medical colleges and public health data from the BMC, we believe that circulation of up to four terabytes will have to be managed in the servers,” said an IT official with the BMC.

The civic body is also planning to store up to four terabytes of data through cloud computing at a disaster recovery site far from Mumbai. “In case of an earthquake or a natural disaster, such data can be recovered from the site, which is in a different seismic zone than that of Mumbai,” said the official.