CMCH begins implementing major project.

The Coimbatore Medical College Hospital (CMCH) recently began implementing a major information technology project that will allow a patient to access his/her case detail at any Government hospital across the State.

An initiative of Tamil Nadu Health Systems Project (TNHSP) and Health Department, the Health Management Information System (HMIS) envisages providing real-time data from all 2,000 healthcare centres in the State to help policymakers to quickly analyse disease patterns, spot epidemic outbreaks and take preventive measures.

Hospital sources told The Hindu that it would begin with the outpatient ward where all patients were now being issued computerised receipts instead of handwritten ones.

The data is immediately available to doctors and pharmacies of the hospital.

All the patients coming to the CMCH were given a Unique Identification Number under which their data would be stored. Support staff from a private IT vendor was now training the CMCH personnel in implementing the project.

The infrastructure works for HMIS project began at the hospital a few months ago. With computerisation of patient records being the initial step, 215 computer systems were provided to all the 32 departments to CMCH besides three laboratories of pathology, microbiology and biochemistry.

All the treatment records of patients, right from the prescriptions issued to out-patients to the discharge summaries of in-patients, would be uploaded on to the HMIS. Doctors need not wait for the physical copies of reports and can access them in their terminal. Even CT scans and MRI reports would be available in this system, sources said.

Being the tertiary referral centre for Western Tamil Nadu and border districts of Kerala, the CMCH witnessed around 6,000 outpatients everyday and had a total of 1,247 in-patients.

A total of Rs. 150 crore had been allotted for the HMIS, which was intended to overcome the problems with manual records which resulted in considerable difficulty in retrieving patient's case histories, duplication of records, data compilation and analysis besides equipment and drug inventory management.

THE HINDU