Partnering with a Hospital run by and for the Tribals of India
It’s not every day that you hear about a modern hospital run by and for the adivasis, the tribal population of India, however the Gudalur Adivasi Hospital is a just that.
Beginning in 1987 as a Community Health Program run by two doctors training adivasi women as health care workers in village, the community soon pushed for a full-fledged hospital. While this seemed highly improbable at the time due to lack of funding and healthcare professionals, as people became more aware of their health, the need for a hospital became urgent.
Then something incredible happened: Dr. Nandakumar and Dr. Shyla decided to move to rural India from the US, where Dr. NK, as people call him, finished his fellowship in surgery. It had been their long time wish to live and serve the people of rural India.
With time, the hospital attracted numerous medical professionals from around the world. Tribal boys and girls were trained as nurses, accountants and paramedical staff. Over two decades later, maternal deaths are a rarity and the area has a better health track record with infant deaths being lower than the national average, and with the adivasis coming voluntarily to the hospital to seek health care.
Despite these great accomplishments, the hospital used a medley of home-grown systems which weren’t interoperable. These systems built with dated technology, could not cope with the expanding hospital needs and its well defined processes. They were keen to have a system that they could manage completely on their own.
It was during a 2015 conference that Stan Thekaekara, a founding member of Ashwini, discovered Bahmni, an open source hospital information and electronic medical records (EMR) system developed by ThoughtWorks.
Read on to follow the details of how the implementation of Bahmni happened at the Gudalur Adivasi Hospital: Partnering with a Hospital for and by the Adivasis (ThoughtWorks Insights — Gayathri Rao)
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author are personal to the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of ThoughtWorks.
