PUNE: The district administration is gearing up to connect public and private Covid hospitals through an internationally recognized software framework for real-time tracking and sharing of data among themselves.
The move follows the Bombay HC slamming PMC recently over its claim of efficient services relating to bed management for Covid-19 through the dashboard.
“A meeting in this regard was held at the divisional commissioner’s office last week, in which it was decided to connect a few hospitals (with EMR) initially through HL7 to see how the system works,” said medical informatics expert Rajeev Joshi, who is advising the district administration in bracing the dashboard via the HL7.
Health Level 7 or HL7 is essentially a set of standards (messaging formats) for the transfer of clinical and administrative data between software applications being used by healthcare providers. Hospitals do not need to change their software to use HL7, they just need to add this free feature. An official from the divisional commissioner’s office said, “We aim to connect all Covid hospitals if the pilot is successful.”
Currently, healthcare units have software not compatible with each other. This has led to islands of data that are not shareable. “Covid hospitals in the city need to increase connectivity among themselves so that patients, as well as bed availability data, are tracked in real-time without any lag. We have suggested hospitals to use the HL7 framework,” said Manisha Naik, PMC’s nodal officer for Covid bed management.
The National Digital Health Blueprint of India, released in November 2019, had recommended HL7 as the de facto standard for healthcare interoperability in India.
