Nagaland Government's eHospital Initiative

The Nagaland government has proposed to implement the eHospital concept in two of its major hospitals in order to ease their data and services management.

Under the initiative, state-owned Kohima-based Naga Hospital and Dimapur-based Civil Hospital -- that attract 40 per cent of patients in the state -- will be the first to adopt the concept.

eHospital is an open source health information management system (HMIS) which is configurable and easily customisable with multi-tenancy support.

It is designed to deploy in cloud infrastructure to manage multiple hospitals seamlessly. It will include eBloodBank and Online Registration System (ORS), as well, said a statement.

Besides, there will be "online appointments with various departments of different hospitals -- using eKYC data of Aadhaar number, if patient's mobile number is registered with UIDAI. In case not it will use patient's name", the statement said.

It also said: "The new patients will get appointment, as well as Unique Health Identification (UHID) number. If Aadhaar number is already linked with UHID number, then appointment number will be given and UHID will remain same."

The eHospital concept confirms to HL7 Standards -- a set of international standards for transfer of clinical and administrative data between software applications used by various healthcare providers -- for managing health care service delivery in government hospitals in India.

Under it ORS, eBloodBank solution is available to government hospitals over cloud for accelerated infusion/adoption of ICT tools and healthcare standards as a part of the initiative.

To promote the initiative, the National Informatic Centre (NIC) is providing eHospital software and cloud infrastructure free of cost as of now.

"eHospital is powerful, flexible, and easy to use; and is designed and developed to deliver real benefits in terms of ITeS from outdoor clinics, IPD, Laboratories, Blood Bank and Hospital as a whole," the statement said.

"eHospital runs on Linux and MS Windows platforms and can be easily customized to suit the requirements and reflect priorities of hospital management team," it said.