HMISA Healthy Success
What happened to Ganapati Budaji Thakur, undergoing treatment at Civil Hospital in Sola, Gujarat, is what has happened to all of us at some point of time. He got his prescription from the doctor but soon after he misplaced it. There was no other option but to go to the doctor again, he thought. That meant another day gone. But he was in for a pleasant surprise when he spoke about his dilemma with a hospital official. He found his prescription entered in a computer record of the hospital and he got all the details again in a jiffy, so to say.
This was all thanks to the Health Management Information System (HMIS), which was launched in Gandhinagar Civil Hospital. With the help of this system, which keeps records and reports of all patients in the hospital, not only the patient has to spend less time per visit but also does not need to carry bulky medical files to the doctor on every visit.
HMIS proved so successful in Gandhinagar, that the Gujarat government scaled up the initiative to cover all 25 district-level hospitals along with six other major hospitals in the State. All government-run hospitals are now connected to the State Health Commissionerate and the Secretariat in Gandhinagar. This not only makes for greater accountability and transparency, but also facilitates prompt and vital policy decisions to tone up the hospital administration and improve health services.
HMIS project was conceptualised by the Gujarat government's Department of Health and Family Welfare, to ensure quality of health using Information Communication and Technology (ICT) as the tool to provide standard clinical and diagnostic tools, hospital management tools and integration of management information at the State level so as to ensure online review and monitoring. The system is aimed at management of vital patient records, analysis of the critical health related data so as to provide an updated planning and policy tool towards provision of quality heath services.
ICT has helped to achieve a number of objectives of HMIS like, creation of electronic medical records that can be shared across hospitals; increased focus on time management that means efficiency of delivery of services; improved resource utilisation, including skilled manpower, equipment, pharmacy and facilities; technology enabled workflow driven process to cut down on manual transmission of data, cutting on time delays, human errors and data integrity; reduction in manual work like preparing indents, reports statistics, etc; comparative data for reviewing hospital and individual performance, based on identified indicators; early alerts on disease trends/cause of deaths on international codes; opportunities for cost analysis; and, improved data integrity.
One of the unique features of the Rs 250 million HMIS project is that a patient registered in a
Factfile
The HMIS project was conceptualised by the Department of Health & Family Welfare, Government of Gujarat to ensure the quality health using ICT as the tool to provide standard clinical and diagnostic tools, hospital management tools and integration of management information at the state level so as to ensure online review and monitoring. HMIS has been envisaged to facilitate better planning, monitoring and control of medical and health services at all levels, using decision support indicators and to assist the doctors and medical staff to improve health services with readily reference patient data, work flow enabled less-paper process and parameterised alarms and triggers during patient treatment cycle.
Coverage
No. of Users 9000+
No. of Modules 26+2 (MIS/EIS)=28
No. of Hospitals covered 30
No. of registrations 8000 +
(Overall Gujarat)
Average No. of Transactions 1,00,000/hospital.
Source: http://www.stockholmchallenge.se/ |
government hospital in a particular district can avail of medical treatment in any other district as long as it is in a networked hospital. HMIS, developed by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on the Microsoft .NET technology platform, has truly brought about a complete transformation in the delivery of health services in the state.
The gains in efficiency achieved through HMIS benefit not just the patient but also the hospital administration, its medical and support staff and the State administration, giving everyone a reason to cheer. For the patient, it means a lot. Apart from time saved and doing away with maintaining medical records, it also means among other things that he has to pay just standard charges for services and he gets online information about availability of doctors.
“Nearly 300 blood tests are done daily and all reports are entered into the computer by 5 pm. The doctors can then access these online,” Pinakin G Parmar, computer operater, Gandhinagar General Hospital, proudly tells the visiting Team Skoch. This means that for the doctors, the system means easier access to the medical history of patients, which has a direct bearing on the efficiency of treatment. Other than that, HMIS provides for parameterised SMS alerts on patients; video facilities that come in really handy in complex procedures like open-heart surgery; and, the creation of a knowledge repository for research and development.
The gains on the administrative side are just as remarkable: for the hospital management, the system means better inventory control, the facility to monitor pre-defined health indicators and decision support based on exception reporting using alerts and triggers. To the State administration, the system affords a 360-degree view of the quality of services in government-run hospitals, and by extension the means to anticipate problems and remedy them in time.
There is yet another facet to the HMIS programme and that concerns various health programmes being run in State to combat diseases. Proformas currently in use under various health programmes have been reorganised and updated. For example, official reports say that for monitoring malaria the total number of registers has been reduced from seven to one, reporting forms from 23 to six and number of columns in reporting forms from 493 to 59. This is expected to save working time of laboratory technicians by 15 per cent, of multi-purpose health supervisors at the primary health centre level by 5 per cent and of all workers engaged in report preparation at district, State and national levels by 100 per cent. The data thus generated is also expected to be of high quality and accuracy, and should lead to more rational planning for combating the disease.
In a nutshell, it’s a win-win situation for all – right from the patient to the doctor to the hospital administration to the State health authorities.
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