Mumbai: BMC has begun a digital overhaul of its healthcare services, from birth and death certificates to hospital records, payments and grievance redressal, in order to make services faster and more transparent for patients.Additional municipal commissioner (city) Prajakta Verma-Lavangare on Tuesday said the civic body plans to digitise all its hospitals shortly. She was in BMC-run Sion Hospital to check the pilot project of the Hospital Management Information System (HMIS) that has begun in the OPD.Around 15,000 outpatients visit Sion Hospital every day, and digital registration would reduce waiting time at registration counters, said AMC.There also is a facility to pay outpatient registration fees through mobile UPI; 10 POS machines have also been installed to facilitate digital payments.BMC plans to expand HMIS to cover patient histories, medical reports and investigations such as sonography, MRI and CT scans, with digital payment options to be added in subsequent phases.Verma-Lavangare also proposed using artificial intelligence-based “text-to-speech” technology in the second phase to convert doctors’ inputs into digital medical records. The system is expected to reduce documentation time for doctors while making records more accessible.The civic administration plans to fully implement HMIS across the hospital and eventually expand the system to other BMC hospitals. “Our maternity homes and HBT clinics already use HMIS. All hospitals too should be on HMIS by April next year.”
