Sakal Times
December 05, 2010

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) have joined hands for developing a healthcare information system (HIS) that is aimed at evolving a single electronic health record (EHR) store for every individual.

The objective of the three-year project is to evolve a standardised EHR that is in a format that can be understood uniformly and operated seamlessly across the country. Hospital information systems are available at present but they are of different standards.

“Statistics indicate that 15 to 20 per cent of the patients brought to a hospital are in an unconscious state and easy access to the medical history of the patient, for rendering the proper line of treatment, can be life saving.

Time is of primary importance in such cases as even few minutes lost could be disastrous,” point out C-DAC executive director Hemant Darbari and senior director Pradeep Sinha.

The Rs 8 crore project, which is shared equally between the Indian and Swedish governments, will, among other things, endeavour to evolve policies and mechanisms for secure storage and access of EHR; build a distributed, scalable and reliable HIS framework for storage and access of EHRs; and develop algorithms for high availability of healthcare information for geographically distributed EHR data stores.

As of now, hospitals have not been roped in for the project and the C-DAC is depending upon its own past experience in Health Informatics. The hospitals would be involved later, Sinha said.

Meanwhile, C-DAC will be hosting a day-long workshop on December 6 during which both the implementing agencies of this project, C-DAC and SICS, will be disseminating information related to the work and discussing with experts and other stake-holders.