What worries me is that MCD is known for not keeping records properly. If they can’t do well with paper, how are they going to keep it paperless?

Patients records is a very sensitive issue and when it come to being stored online special guidelines have to be followed in terms of data security otherwise anyone could hack into the system and steal patient data. What will the MCD do in terms of server security? How will the information be passed from the local server residing in the hospitals to the central server of MCD.

MCD hospitals lack basic facility, how will they ensure that the servers remain in a dust free facility with 100% power and physical security backup? There are far too many questions which need to be answered before patients even agree to let MCD store their data online.

Though it is a bold step but I think the Municipal Corporation of Delhi has bit a little more then they can chew.

Original Article taken from HT epaper

PATIENTS GOING to MCD hospitals for treatment need not worry about maintaining their records, as the civic body has come up with a ‘Hospital Information System’ (HIS) and an ‘Electronic Patient Folder’ (EPF) to keep track of their records. MCD Commissioner K.S. Mehra commissioned the systems at the Hindu Rao Hospital on Thursday.

“The commissioning of this system will not only save time, but will also lead to better patient care through improved management system and easy access to information and better quality of documentation too,” said Mehra.

The patients will not have to worry about maintaining their records as every patient has been given a unique registration number and feeding the unique registration number can retrieve all the patient-data.

Not only this, the electronic patient folder stored in the MCD central server can be viewed by any hospital of MCD too.

Now all the six major hospital of MCD such as Hindu Rao, Rajan Babu TB General Hospital, Kasturba Hospital, Swami Dayanand Hospital, among others have been integrated. The civic body is hoping to extend the HIS and EPF system to other medical institutions like maternity and child welfare centres. “The objective of the newly introduced information technology is to improve patient care and better hospital management,” said Janak Diggal, Additional Commissioner (Health).

The HIS software consists of 33 modules connecting all the six hospitals catering to the needs of out-patient and inpatient functionality within each hospital including patient registration with demographic details, appointment scheduling, admission/bed, transfer/discharges among others. “The architecture followed is a distributed system, where two servers are being placed in each hospital, called application server and database server. The database server will be connected to the central server of MCD,” said R.K. Patnaik, an MCD official.