e-hospital records poorly managed in Telangana

Saifabad: The Comptroller of Auditor General has revealed that thee-Hospital Management System e-HMS, an electronic record management system which store the patient data and track their medical history,did not function effectively due to inadequate validation controls and inaccuracies in data such as spelling mistakes, missing contact numbers and inappropriate date on files.

The auditor analysed data of 22.47 lakh patients from October 2015 toMarch 2019 and found that only 2.25 lakh patients' contact numbers wereavailable in records, and of them 2,098 contact numbers wereinvalid. It was also observed that the entries in mandatory fields such as patient name, father's name, address, date of births.

The CAG report on the discharge summary disclosed that in 475 cases thedate of admission was mentioned after the date of discharge and alsoallotment of bed was recorded after the date of discharge in 5,706cases out of 39,993. Similarly, the bed allocation details of 1.1 lakh(73 per cent) out of 1.51 lakh inpatients were also not available. Itis said that in 40,940 cases bed allocation was delayed.

The Comptroller of Auditor General also observed that the 144 doctorsand nurses had not logged into e-HMS once at least since the user IDwas created and 229 users accessed only once.

The Centre forDevelopment of Advanced Computing CDAC has provided training to 1,172users during 2015 -18. During the scrutiny it came to be knowledge that thedata of 744 users is not available with the e-HMS.The project was started under the Ministry of Electronics andInformation Technology (MeitY), in May 2014 in Telangana, it was fully funded by the Government of India with a total outlay of 10.49 crore.