Bangalore: A project to computerise the five government teaching hospitals in Bangalore and to connect them to the Directorate of Medical Education, which has been in the pipeline for almost five years, has taken off.

Once the project is implemented, most of the hospital management work in these medical institutions 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 — will become "paperless."

According to sources in the Directorate of Medical Education, in 2001, when the S.M. Krishna Government was in power, the project for computerising of all teaching hospitals was sanctioned and around Rs. 1 crore was allocated for it.

But apart from the SDS Tuberculosis Sanatorium, the project did not see the light of day in any of the other institutions, including the directorate itself.

Till now, neither the directorate, nor the other four hospitals have used information technology to make their services more patient-friendly.

But all that is now poised to change. The Government is in the process of computerising and linking the Directorate of Medical Education to the five hospitals, so that a system in the directorate will allow access to information on patient inflow and financial transactions in each of these hospitals at the click of the mouse.

Streamlining

"All patient records, registration information, billing procedures, stores and pharmacy in the teaching hospitals will be computerised and all this information will be available to us at the directorate.

"This will help streamline the financial transactions, including drugs procurement and indenting in the medical stores which is not being done properly," Ramananda Shetty, Directorate of Medical Education, told The Hindu.

Dr. Shetty said Rs. 70 lakh had been allocated for the project last year and this year too some money would be sanctioned.

The directorate had procured 70 computers for the project and only the connectivity was yet to be given. Bion Computers was implementing the project for the directorate. Dr. Shetty said computerisation of the TB sanatorium had been taken up on a trial basis and based on the success of the project there the other hospitals were being information technology -enabled.

According to TB sanatorium authorities, the hospital was connected with 18 computers and registration, patient record, billing and stores had been computerised.

Upgrading

"Around Rs. 1.5 lakh was spent recently to upgrade the software. In another six weeks we will become `paperless'," the hospital authorities said.

"We faced some resistance from the staff in the other hospitals as they were not keen on the idea of `paperless' working and therefore the delay.

"Most of them are also not trained in computers. Now we have decided to outsource the work and we will be hiring a few data entry operators soon," Dr. Shetty said.

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