Thiruvananthapuram: Patient management, medical records maintenance and day-to-day administration have become easier affairs at the Medical College Hospital here, as the hospital management system implemented by the Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) has become fully operational.

The system had been on the run for the past one-and-a-half years and was formally inaugurated last month.

First in State

The Thiruvananthapuram MCH is the first one in the State to be fully computerised, and now that the benefits of an automated hospital management system has begun to sink in among the staff, there have been demands that such systems be replicated in other Government hospitals too.

This is also the first time that CDAC has attempted the computerisation of a Government hospital as mammoth as the MCH here.

The software used here is also the most advanced and sophisticated currently available. The campus-wide network, with fibre optic backbone, links the outpatient clinics of 21 clinical departments, 35 inpatient wards, five operation theatres, nine ICUs, 10 laboratories, nine OP counters, registration and enquiry counters in the hospital.

The system has 250 nodes with 80 computers and as many printers and UPSs, 14 fibre-optic network switches, to be managed by two servers.

"The accent was on developing a user-friendly software, with features that will directly benefit the public. All patient-care activities such as outpatient and inpatient registrations, payward reservations, generation of lab results and discharge summary have been automated. There were some inhibitions among the hospital staff initially, despite the training and motivational sessions, but they have now realised how the system helps them to organise their work better," says G. Alexander, Deputy Director (Hospital Informatics), who led the project.

Quick retrieval of consolidated information on patients is now possible for doctors and nurses, making patient care easier.

Accessing information

One of the major problems faced by patients and visitors to the MCH was the difficulty in accessing information, be it the availability of OP clinics or locating a patient who has been admitted as inpatient. Now, a visitor need give only the name of the patient or his/her native place at the enquiry counter and the patient can be easily located using the search facility. This information can be accessed from any terminal.

Nine computerised counters and 12 token display systems are available at the OP division, which caters to an average of 1,000 patients every day. Printed OP tickets are issued to patients, with token numbers so that the crowd can be managed better. For admissions, entering the OP number will automatically sent the details to the ward.

Lab tests can be ordered from the wards by the nursing staff and the results can be accessed from the wards itself, unlike before, when it was the patient's duty to collect the lab reports. Any patient information can now easily be retrieved and this has helped in the generation of a valuable database that will enable doctors to identify disease patterns.

Registries have been set up for accidents and incidents, major accidents with mass casualties, for quick access to information. Information about epidemics or infectious diseases is sent automatically to the Prevention of Epidemics and Infectious Diseases Cell, so that one can easily generate statistics for the information of authorities.

The system has also made ward management and staff scheduling easier for the nursing staff. Duty posting of nurses and deployment of general staff on a day can be easily managed now.

Earlier, a good part of the duty time of nurses used to be spent on generating daily ward census reports, diet reports and staff movement registers. These reports are now generated at the click of a button, reducing the burden of paper work.

Nursing Superintendents can now glance through the computer chart and re-deploy staff to wards as per requirement. Payward reservations and availability of rooms have all been automated.

The SAT hospital and the Regional Institute of Ophthalmology are yet to be brought into the network.

In the second phase, the store, pharmacy, medical records division and the blood bank will be brought into the system, by adding another 70 nodes.

Touch-screen kiosks, scrolling display and e-notes taker (a hand-held device) for doctors have been planned.

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