Powering a state-wide

The E-Health Research Center (EHRC) @ IIIT-B is an interdisciplinary Research Center that spreads across all areas of research interests in the institute towards doing applied research in the use of Information & Communication Technologies (ICTs) to meet the healthcare needs of the under-served and marginal population groups in India and similar regions across the world, with an objective of improving affordability, accessibility and availability of technology solutions covering medical devices, health data, and delivery [platforms and models]. Current focus areas are mental health, malnutrition and disabilities.

The Government of Karnataka wanted to build a state-wide solution to propel the digitization of mental healthcare services. EHRC was given the responsibility of developing this solution in partnership with NIMHANS. The solutions needed to be compliant with the Mental Health Care Act, 2017 and Rules (2018) with registries of all public and private mental healthcare establishments, mental health professionals (psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, mental health nurses), persons with mental illness and their caregivers. Further in compliance with the Mental Health Act, checks and balances such as Mental Health Review Board and Advance Directives to safeguard interest of mental health patients had to be supported.

EHR.Network’s data platform was chosen as it provided the required compliance and scalability to create a web-based solution called e-Manas. e-Manas included a state-wide registry of all facilities and professionals providing mental health care with online registration. There were many challenges, and the most crucial was to create an open platform which would support all mental health and social care services across districts, an extremely complex and vast system. The core of the approach was to separate data from applications and EHR.Network’s openEHR approach was most appropriate to accomplish this goal.

The system was envisaged with a centralized mental health EHR to manage the Basic Medical Records (BMR) of the patients. This EHR will be shared across establishments based on the consent of the patient. After a successful pilot project, e-Manas was rolled out across the state of Karnataka. EHR.Network was deployed to ensure a structured and standards-based clinical data repository for the centralised Electronic Health Record. e-Manas now keeps data in an open and structured format that is technology- and vendor-neutral, and has tools which are easy to use for healthcare professionals. Our platform enabled powerful querying functions and doing analyses of standardised healthcare data, which can be further used for the coordination of regional care.