An Affordable Hospital Information System
Dr. M. Sasikumar
Associate Director (Research)
July 28, 2009
Dear Sir/Madam,
With the advent of computerisation in every field, hospitals and other medical establishments have also been using computers for more effective management of their activities. The use of computers range from a number of independent PCs used at each work area – patient registration, pharmacy, etc – with no sharing of data, to completely integrated Hospital Information System (HIS). A Hospital Information System provides a well coordinated automation framework across all aspects of a medical centre / hospital, over a networked set of computers. A well-designed HIS would provide adequate flexibility to customise the workflow and policies of the system as per the organisation requirements, and make relevant data accessible to relevant users with adequate attention to security and privacy.
Though a number of commercial vendors are in the market, offering HIS solutions, they often fall short of expectations for reasons such as the following:
1. Medical institutions in India span a wide range in terms of size, complexity, facilities, policies, administration mechanism, etc. demanding a very high degree of customisation on the system.
2. No product offers the user the full source code of the system along with access and modification rights; thus, a few years down the line as requirements change, there is no flexibility to modify the system. Consequently, one needs to live with ill-suited system or suffer massive cost in moving to a new system. If the vendor, who provided the original system, is not active any more, the entire system and investment may have to be written off – often with the associated data records.
3. Institutions in rural areas would require Indian language interface and ability to enter / access data in Indian languages. Most commercial softwares do not provide this.
Considering these difficulties, in order to prevent vendor lock-in and provide freedom to enhance the applications as per user needs, C-DAC Mumbai is building an open source HIS. Open source software, by definition, gives the user the full source code along with relevant freedom to make modifications. Thus you are not dependent on any given vendor or company to manage your application. With Unicode compliance and adequately internationalised softwares, extension to support any Indian language is not a problem.
Following the open source philosophy, we are building this by adapting an available HIS called Care2X. This is written in PHP with MySQL database; both of these are popular web application frameworks and hence a user can easily find human resources to help maintain the system, if required. This is a popular HIS with rich features that have been well tested. However, the features provided are limited. We are working on extending the system with support for pharmacy, blood bank, stores, richer doctor-staff features, etc.
We would like to do this with the active involvement of the potential user community. In this regard, we are organising a stakeholder meeting on September 11, 2009 10 :00 AM, at our Kharghar, Navi Mumbai campus, involving medical establishments (hospitals, nursing homes, clinics, labs, etc) who may be interested in an integrated, customisable HIS system. We would like to evolve an appropriate business model, evolve ways to take your feedback on a regular basis, explore viable deployment mechanisms, etc. Participation in the workshop is by invitation only. There will be no registration fee.
If you/your institution is interested, please let us know, so that we can send you an invite for the same.
Please confirm your participation by e-mail/fax. In case you have any queries or need any clarification, please write to us at his@cdacmumbai.in.
Looking forward to your participation.
Yours sincerely,
(M. Sasikumar)
