Hospitals to track equipment, medicine stock in real-time

A week after health activists reported a shortage of medicines and equipment in state-run hospitals in Maharashtra, the Directorate of Medical Education and Research (DMER) has decided to upgrade its online system to track the stock of medicines in hospitals in real time.

The DMER plans to upgrade the Hospital Management Information System (HMIS) — an online database of health records in government-run hospitals — so that doctors and administrative officers can feed data into the system to include the shortage of medicines in every hospital. After the upgrade, everyone, from the doctors to the dean of the hospital, can be aware of the depleting medicine and equipment stocks through the HMIS.

“We have already hired an agency to build the additional system to keep a track on realtime stock usage of governmentrun hospitals.

Access to the information will be given to deans and head of departments and representatives of the Maharashtra Association of Resident Doctors (MARD) —a body of all 4,500 resident doctors of Maharashtra — so that the shortage of medicines can be communicated much quicker,” said Dr Pravin Shingare, director of DMER

Shingare has also announced to provide an additional kitty of ₹1 lakh per day to deans and medical superintendents to ensure they do not run out of medicines during treatment. In Mumbai, hospitals under the JJ group of hospitals — Sir JJ Hospital, Cama Hospital, GT Hospital and St George Hospital — will receive the benefit of the additional kitty.

Shingare said the additional kitty will be able to resolve the issue of immediate shortage of medicines since they would not have to wait for the state government’s approval to order medicines. In a survey of six major district hospitals from Nagpur, Pune, Satara, Solapur, Beed and Osmanabad, the JAA members had found the lack of availability of 132 medicines, consumables and other equipment.

Of the combined stock of these six hospitals, there was zero stock of 34% of these 132 medicines and equipment.

The survey found that only 29% of these medicines and equipment in the combined stock would last for a week.

The JAA study had revealed that only 21% of the medicines and consumables in the combined stock were available in adequate quantity at these hospitals.

MUMBAI: THE DMER PLANS TO UPGRADE ITS ONLINE DATABASE TO INCLUDE THE SHORTAGE OF MEDICINES IN SYSTEM