Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

Poor utilisation of MCH computerisation project

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Three years after a sophisticated hospital management and integrated solutions software was installed at the Medical College Hospital (MCH) here, making it a fully computerised and networked hospital, the system remains poorly utilised by doctors as well as the paramedical staff. The MCH authorities said though the software would enable easy maintenance of out-patient management, in-patient admission, ward/lab management, computerised case-sheet and discharge summary management, nearly 70 per cent of the capacity of the system remained un-utilised.

Only about 20 per cent of the doctors were using the system to keep case records or to issue discharge summaries. As for the paramedical staff, while the system could be used for preparing diet registers for various wards or monitoring the medicine requirements, the system was used only to prepare the duty charts of a few.

In fact, three years after the installation of the system and several rounds of training for doctors and other paramedical staff, the MCH was yet to formulate an institutional policy that its staff utilised the system to generate all hospital/patient management records.

“The MCH does not have a formal computer division yet to handle the system. Medical records keeping and documentation is not something that can be handled in an ad hoc manner because the data is invaluable for future planning and development of the hospital,” said a senior MCH official. The MCH should have a proper computer division and staff in place to take over, once the implementing agency – the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) – was ready to pull out of the project. Though the CDAC had informed the hospital authorities in January that either the annual maintenance contract be renewed or make their own arrangements for employing data entry operators by March, this was not done. There was much commotion and over-crowding in the OP ticket counter at MCH the other day after the temporary data entry operators employed by CDAC stopped working. Though the authorities managed to get the counters operational by re-deploying computer-trained staff from other departments, MCH authorities would have to adopt some pro-active steps lest the system suffered a total collapse.

The MCH became the first major government hospital in the State to go in for full automation when the Rs.137-lakh integrated solutions project for hospital management was implemented. 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.

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