BANGALORE: In a step towards establishing a paperless office, the upcoming Institute of Nephro-Urology at Victoria Hospital will digitally store all medical records. All information about patients would be stored so that a patient did not carry bulky folders containing his/her medical history to the hospital for every appointment, said M.N. Vidyashankar, Principal Secretary in the Medical Education Department. A tender for the hospital information management system, which digitises all records, had been floated. It is expected to be decided by the month-end.

The Institute of Nephro-Urology is a new department that is coming up at Victoria Hospital. The civil works, which were underway for eight years, had been completed. Mr. Vidyashankar said the Department of Medical Education chose this institute for implementing the system because it would be easy to try out the experiment of digitisation on a new department. "We wanted to start the process from the first patient we saw, instead of going through old records in different departments and scanning the medical records in them."

Venkatesh, a nephro-urologist, who would be in charge of the institute at Victoria Hospital, said the health information management system would contain patient's demographic profile, time and date of consultations and clinical information, including examination findings, diagnosis and method of treatment. This, he said, would reduce errors that were likely to arise out of poor interpretation of the doctor's handwriting, speed up healthcare and reduce the burden of paperwork on doctors. "We are so busy that most often, we do not have time to fill in paper work," Dr. Venkatesh said.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail