BENGALURU : By November-end, the Karnataka Health and Family Welfare department aims to have a real-time dashboard, running with information publicly available on all health parameters. “Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) and other statistics, reporting of communicable diseases like dengue, tuberculosis, non-communicable diseases, rabies cases caused by dog bite, deaths due to water contamination, etc will be put up. It will not only provide transparent information to the public, but also be used as a planning and disease trends analysis tool for the government,” said Randeep D, Health Commissioner.
This is one of the requirements of the National Digital Health Mission, and the department hopes to create the dashboard in-house, as they already have all the data. Consultants may be roped in, if needed. Experts say health data visualisation at the population level is important for planning, implementation of programmes and evaluation, referred to as PIE in public health. This will have a bearing on surveillance activities and course correction, pointed out Dr Nanda Kumar BS, Associate Professor, Community Medicine, MS Ramaiah Medical College.
“The experience the department gained due to the pandemic and opening up of Covid-19 war rooms can be brought into this dashboard. It can help in comparison of health parameters between districts and states. It will help gauge our stand on Sustainable Development Goals such as IMR and MMR,” Dr Nanda Kumar said.
Having a dashboard with display of health programme beneficiaries was one of the recommendations made by the health technology sub-group of the Karnataka Health and Medical Education Vision group.
Currently, the department has data on excel sheets and the like, but the information is not collated into a central repository. Apart from this, the state plans to revive some national health programmes and also equip hospitals with sufficient drugs and oxygen.