BMC may face flak for delay in hospital management system
DESPITE INVESTING ₹100 CRORE, A MAJOR PART OF IMPLEMENTATION REMAINS ON PAPER AND ONLY 800 COMPUTERS HAVE BEEN INSTALLED IN NAIR AND KASTURBA HOSPITALS SO FAR
MUMBAI: The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) delay in procuring equipment for its Health Management Information System (HMIS) is likely to face criticism by the Opposition in its standing committee meeting today.
For the past 15 years, BMC has been unsuccessful in implementing the cloud-based information management system which is meant to keep track of patients’ medical histories, realtime details of functioning equipment and medical stock, at various hospitals.
Ravi Raja, leader of Opposition, said, “The money spent on this project so far should be looked into since there is no improvement on ground. A 15-year delay is shameful for the richest municipal corporation.”
Despite an investment of ₹100 crore and an additional ₹250 crore required, a major part of the implementation remains on paper.
So far, only 800 computers have been installed in Nair and Kasturba Hospital out of the 6,600 required for the project.
While the existing computers that were installed have not been used completely, a proposal to procure more computers worth ₹7 crore has been tabled before the standing committee which will be discussed on Wednesday.
Rais Shaikh, a Samajwadi Party corporator, said, “There is a group of medical practitioners that do not want this project to be implemented since it brings accountability in the health system. The amount of money that has been put in for the project is huge and this kind of delay is clearly wastage of taxpayers’ money.”
In 2004, the first tender for developing HMIS software in Bhabha Hospital at Bandra was floated.
Civic officials working on HMIS project since then said that several administrative lapses and technical difficulties have resulted in a major delay in implementation of the project.
A senior civic official said, “A major hurdle that has stalled the system now is the doctors’ refusal to feed in details of medicines prescribed to a particular patient in the system. They complained that they are overburdened with routine work and cannot type in details for the patient.”
The official further said, “The doctors are demanding to appoint data-entry operators to type in medical details which, if calculated, will need another ₹100 crore investment.”
The HMIS project aims to connect all of Mumbai’s primary, periphery and tertiary civic hospitals so that all the information is available at a single click.