A Thousand Miracles a Day

Krishna Kumar

Recently, I visited the Regional Cancer Centre at Tiruvananthapuram. This government hospital, situated almost at the southern tip of the country sees patients not only from other states but also from Maldives, I am told.About a thousand people visit the hospital daily, in search of much needed succor. Like the geographical spread, the patients too come from all walks of life and all ages. Given the nature of illness, most have to come back again and again, sometimes for years. With this scale of operations, in a government establishment, you can expect the staff to be a much-harried lot and the quality of health care to be indifferent, if not poor.

My experience, if anything, was the opposite.

Sure, there are infrastructure limitations, the guards could be more polite! Still, it is a fairly efficiently run hospital, with the staff often going that extra step to help the patients. What is it that enables the staff to pull it off, day in and day out? Maybe the fact that they are able to get information about patients really fast. Helping them do that is a hospital information system developed by CDAC! Given the complexity and scale of the hospital's operations, the application must be complex. As the case records are maintained in paper files, there should be an effective filing system too, at the back end. But what the staff sees is a simple GUI front end, where entering the patient registration number enables them to track the current status of any patient, carry out new patient registration, set up appointments, schedule surgeries or prepare bills and check patients out after surgery.

Of course, they still need to use the phone, like when a particular case record is to be traced or has gone to the wrong department. There would be other problems with the app. But what matters is that just by typing in a registration number, the staff is able to direct thousands in their quest for succor. What matters is that they are not inundated with screen after screen of information, but just what is required then.

I have seen many enterprise apps at work, analyzed many and even designed few myself. But this is the most beautiful enterprise app I have seen; it pulls off a thousand miracles a day, every day, speeding thousands on their way to care and recovery.

It does that using a simple interface and by being to the point. And that's what most apps miss.