E-Paper
Tech glitch and patients bear the brunt
THE HOSPITAL Information System (HIS) of Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Science (SGPGIMS) had collapsed on June 11 and remained ?comatose? for four days till June 14. The system got restored the next morning. And more than the collapse, it is restoration of the system that is causing patients and doctors more problems.
THE HOSPITAL Information System (HIS) of Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Science (SGPGIMS) had collapsed on June 11 and remained ‘comatose’ for four days till June 14. The system got restored the next morning. And more than the collapse, it is restoration of the system that is causing patients and doctors more problems.
HIS is the computer software network specially designed for the SGPGIMS that bypasses paper work and puts every information related to a patient’s registration, to admission or illness, to diagnostics, treatment, operation or post operation, and his accounts-billings information on the system. Any information can be accessed from any computer or laptop hooked on to the HIS.
So, on those days when the HIS had remained out of service, all works for those four days were done manually, like it happens in KGMU or any other hospital in the city where patients have paper files.
“This was fine, as computer systems do hang sometimes. What is bugging the patients and their doctors is the way hospital administration is handling situation after restoration. They are putting patients and doctors in great inconvenience by shirking work and not making entries into the HIS from the manual records that they had prepared while the system was down,” said a senior consultant and a resident doctor.
The hospital administration staff that is supposed to make entries to slow down the clearing of piled up work for days, are asking patients and their relatives to come with the manual receipts and papers that they were given during those four days, get the patient discharged from the hospital ‘manually’ and then re-admit the patient on HIS.
HT Lucknow Live when contacted Dr AK Bhatt, Medical Superintendent said: “See we will have to call patients or their relatives to clear their accounts.” But clearing accounts comes in case of those patients who were being discharged. And not in the case of those whose treatment continues at the institute.
A resident of a department said: “We had to create a sort of ruckus the other day as one of the patients who was operated upon during those four days, need some medicines after the HIS was restored. We had no information about his medicines on our computers while it was urgent for us to have the information.”
SGPGIMS was the first hospital in the country to have HIS. HIS at AIIMS came after SGPGIMS. The HIS is good, the doctors say, but administration sometimes mismanages it.
