Jain Suveinay and Dr. R. D. Lele of Lilavati Hospital in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India are working on a project to use OpenEMR in a trial Health Maintenance Organization. Their plan is to deliver health care to include 100 doctors managing the health care of 50000 families (4 members per family) spread over a wide area network. The patient population lives in a slum area of Mumbai. Jain Suveinay: We will have a central server which will be accessed by the GP’s. Links to pharmacy and hospital will be also there. There is more information concerning this initiative at Health Maintenance in Mumbai

Dr. R.D. Lele, a Padmabhusan award holder (which is given by the government of India for excellence in the indivduals respective field), and the head of nuclear medicine and research at the Lilavati Hospital is heading up the project. Dr. Lele has been a respected health care leader in India and holds numerous emeritus positions. Jain Suveinay has requested assistance from Open Source Medical Software and the OpenEMR community of developers to add a number of features to OpenEMR to make the project more functional for their situation.

Dr. Samuel T. Bowen, MD, the president of Open Source Medical Software, has volunteered to his assistance to write grants to fund the project. The advantages of using a free open source electronic record in this type of program are tremendous. This is a great way to leverage a relatively small investment on hardware into having a big impact on health care in areas of severe poverty.

Using an electronic health record will allow measurement of outcomes, allow systematic tracking of vaccination programs. This systems developed for this program will improve health locally in Mumbai and should be extensible all indigent areas of the world.

See www.oemr.org for more information on OpenEMR.