Medical records if carefully stored in an electronic form, can be very useful in decision-making. However, most of the hospitals in the country are failing to utilize the data that is available with them, says Mohd. Masood Ahmed, head of Deccan School of Management, Hyderabad.

Using the medical records, hospitals should analyse the services that they offer, forecast demand and supply trends of healthcare services. Majority of the hospitals maintain and preserve case sheets, registers, and reports in hard copy, which cannot be used conveniently. Less than 25 per cent of hospitals in India would have a fully computerized system which would be linked with clinical, diagnostic and other support services.

Hospitals should ensure that they maintain records of each patient from the time he enters the hospital till he gets discharged, after treatment. Hospitals maintaining such records would be preferred by patients, as they fail to preserve them safely. Hospitals would be in a win-win situation when they realize and practice it.

It is also found that hospitals rarely do ‘follow-up’. In cases where patients undergo certain treatment, asked to re-visit for a check up, fail to make it for various reasons such as forgetting the date of re-visit, or improvement in the condition of patient, ignorant of its importance etc., it becomes the moral responsibility of the hospitals to remind them about it.

These records also come handy in case of patients who had undergone surgery. It will be a very valuable data for the patients themselves and will be useful to hospitals in conducting surgeries in future. This effort requires technology, manpower, investment and moreover, willingness to carry it out. Hospitals, which cannot afford ERP can go for custom built software. IT companies should also come forward with software that suit to hospitals of different scale of operations, enabling them to store and retrieve medical data efficiently, he averred.