215
Kerala’s corona electronic medical data deal ends in shambles
P. S. Remesh Chandran
Editor, Sahyadri Books & Bloom Books, Trivandrum
Image by Kewl. Graphics: Adobe SP.
1
The first corona virus case in the world was reported in China towards the end of 2019. The first corona virus case in India was reported in Kerala in Trichur in Kerala when a student traveling from Wuhan in China to India reached the native town on 01 January 2020. Soon many people came from foreign countries carrying this disease and people in Kerala began to be affected from them. As the number of cases increased the health data of the people who came to Kerala from abroad and who came to Kerala from other states of India had to be collected and analyzed and a follow-up action charted. In addition to updating data on people either under observation or under treatment, the data on the health staff in the state engaged in disease control and treatment and interacting with them also had to be collected and analyzed to identify who would be next susceptible to be affected. Considering that around 2,00,000 people were under quarantine in Kerala during this period, it was not small data. It was enormous.
This data comprising of complete medical and personal data of the affected and the likely to be affected people of Kerala including their symptoms and health conditions, present and past diseases, their treatments present and past, and geo-positioned satellite tracking of all these people, not to mention details of their insurance coverage if any for treatment, collected at lower levels and sent upwards had to be processed and analyzed and decisions arrived at in each individual case and at the community level for which special tools had to be engaged.
To track patients, digital intelligence on them has to be created which is done by collecting patients’ structured and unstructured data and processing and analyzing them. Government needed software in the form of an App which could be downloaded into and made functional in the various devices including mobile phones, laptops and computers used by personnel from the field staff level to the master controlling centre level. Thus data would be collected by field staff and fed to the control centre and the control centre in its turn would process and analyze this data and inform the field staff what to do in each individual case and at the community level.
When the corona virus spread through Kerala during the months of February-March of 2020, the government had this immense data but ‘according to them’ had no know-how to process and meaningfully use it. The political commission agents in government came up with the name of a foreign data collection and processing service provider who in records agreed to provide this service free of cost under conditions for a few months. They were assigned the job and entrusted with the data which they were expected to receive and store in their server wherever it was. They were soon exposed and proved to have been illegally involved in the American presidential elections. The only justification the government had to offer was this company was founded by an American-resident Keralite and his services were offered free-of-cost.
A government can contract the help of private technology specialists if and only when governmental capabilities are not sufficient and contract foreign private technology specialists only if native private technology specialists are not available there for use. But a government overriding governmental and native capabilities and going after inferior and dubious foreign private ‘capabilities’ who have practically no experience in health care was what the Kerala government did in its Sprinklr deal. Knowing well in advance that the nefarious data transfers in this deal in future may result in legal litigation, to escape Indian courts, the government also agreed to the law governing jurisdiction being fixed as New York. This law-breaking tendency of the people in government was clear indication of the breaking of many laws by its collaborating company itself on their part in future in that they were hoping the government would be functioning as the collector and the company as the seller, an experienced seller, of the data. The mutual benefit would be the people in government- that is the political commission agents associated with or in the ruling party of the government- would be unburdened with the complexities of selling the data and the company would be relieved of the huge expenses of collecting the huge data.
One thing which must be noted here is that though collection and processing of health data by electronic means is what is called e-health, the government, the media and everyone associated with this undercover deal carefully avoided using the name e-health. They called it everything but e-health, keeping the already much publicized and expensive e-health project of Kerala out of the picture and keeping it in reserve for more lucrative other deals in future before the term of government expires in a few months.
Medical data stored in a server can be misused or lost due to a multitude of reasons. Discussing the data outside of the office and business associates breaching privacy, security and data confidentiality are common. Phones, laptops and USB devices attached to using the data can be lost or stolen, hack-wares may invade and mal-wares run. Improper security safeguards and lack of ample access controls may lead to data unauthorizedly accessed, stolen, misused or sold. The security protocols may have purposefully inbuilt loopholes to override administrative, technical and physical safeguards in the system and drain data onto the black market where it will get on average three times more of important and confidential financial data and be used for thousands of purposes by hundreds of companies and individuals including blackmailers and ransom seekers.
Instead of the minimum data needed for the execution of a given assignment, the bulk of the data in the repository could be made to be exposed to an accessing person who could sell it piecemeal on who-needs what-basis to be used for a wide variety of companies and individuals. Employers of firms may want confidential medical data of staff and will pay handsomely for getting hold of that information. The amount that changes hands will always be many times higher than the legal fine for that information unauthorizedly changing hands if detected.
The National Informatics Centre is India’s prime and paramount institution in the IT sector, far experienced and credible compared to its foreign competitors, and the most ideal IT tool and the biggest data analytics platform in India for the various Indian states to crunch the personal health information of citizens collected by field workers. While this institution’s services were available without the hassle of the data being stolen and misused by foreign agencies when the corona virus threat was becoming a reality in India, the Kerala government ignoring this national institution approached an American-based and controversial- controversial in being illegally involved in the American presidential elections and facing prosecution there- firm to receive, store and process the health data the state was collecting from citizens in connection with the corona defense. When this deal came to public light and the government’s motivation for this deal was questioned, the Chief Minister of the state, Comrade Mr. Pinarayi Vijayan told that this American company was offering its services free, the state had no other companies accessible or available at the time, and the government had proprietary rights over the health data collected electronically which will be protected and will never be misused or monetized by this American company. He also emphasized the fact that this company was run by a Malayali as if all Malayalis are clean!
Many large multinational hospital chains which operate even within India have excellent electronic patient data management systems which already handle very big data collected in real time from patients, analyzes it in no time, and tell doctors and nurses what to do. Their systems manage millions of patients at one time and it is very strange that the Kerala government did not approach any of them for help to handle a large volume of data when an epidemic began to make its sweep in Kerala.
This company was till then only a social media management company providing apps and software for social media management. They were never experienced in managing massive health data from hundred thousands of people. It was their first attempt of this kind and one or two of their software was modified to accommodate the health data collection and processing needs of the Kerala government. They were using Kerala government as a stepping stone in to big health data management. Had this deal originated in any other state in India it would not have ended in controversy. The people of Kerala- the highest literate state in India- are unique in that they view suspiciously any data storage system, especially health data collection and storage, and if it is handed over to and stored by a private company as highly suspicious. The perpetrators of this deal did not consider this mindset of the people in Kerala whose data was what they were going to collect and as a result this deal became controversial and a topic of public debate. As a result the trustworthiness and honesty of this data collection was lost and people of Kerala are now doubly suspicious. Remember that the crowd of IT experts and net investigators and net hackers on the right side of law in India and in the world are a large part Keralites and they are now vigilant enough to detect where and when this data resurfaces and is made use of commercially by parties who were never signatories to this agreement between Kerala government and a foreign company on behalf of Kerala people.
Why should their services be free under conditions of course at least for a time? It is because they are in possession of the data free. Any insurance company would be eager to get hold of this data to learn in advance which of their policy holders had which of the diseases before taking their insurance policy so that they can deny payment of medical expenses saying, and also proving, that the policy holder concealed information on treatments of previous diseases. If they escape payment of 2,00,000 rupees of medical coverage and had to pay 50,000 rupees for getting hold of information on that particular case, still they had made a very handsome profit. Think how elaborate and efficient medical data theft would be and is! Of course the service provider can offer their services to government free. What is most important for them is access to the data which they get free anyway.
2
In government’s opinion manual processes of medical care which were generating thousands of medical records which were dispersed across several different locations were creating problems. The meaning: A person or a company sitting at or situated at Bombay or New York cannot now see the medical records in the General Hospital or the Medical College, Trivandrum. Therefore every medical record should be kept in the electronic form, uploaded in real time to a central data base, and stored there to be available to anyone from anywhere to see.
HP Enterprise Services India officially announced on 27 July 2015 that they were selected as partners in the e-health project of Kerala by the Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Kerala, for providing the core technology, applications, various online and real time services, and collect, store, analyze and research medical data. The HP was to be in partnership with JK Technosoft in this deal with the Kerala Government. The e-clinical services they offered included online prescription, online diagnostics and online imaging, the data and images they all generated going to their dynamically updated central universal database in a cloud server and accessible to doctors from anywhere on a need-only-basis. The idea was, once HP takes care of the responsibility of data collection and monitoring of treatment, doctors can access their data repository, get real-time advice and focus on patients better and take care of treatments more efficiently.
How this e-health will be working in hospitals is in more or less this way: All the people above 30 will be invited to screen for hypertension and diabetes, records will be created of those tested positive, their current medications noted, and they will be notified in their mobile phones after three months to go check their blood pressure and sugar levels again, all data fed into the central data bank under unique identification. The concept is these persons using their biometric authentication can go to any hospital and for the doctors there access on the desktops or other devices there their demographic and medical data by the help of the authorized employee in that institution. Other diseases detected will have other similar sub data bases from which other regimens will be advised to the patients through their doctors.
The mobile health world of 32000 apps and 28 billion US dollars as assets!
The m-health or mobile health apps are the new applications for collecting and stealing medical data. Their projected value in 2018 was 28 billion US dollars. More than 200 mobile health apps are added to the worldwide app stores each day and as of now 320,000 of them are available to download and install in websites, tablet computers and mobile phones now. Ninety percent of these are created exclusively for the purpose of stealing medical data of people for various interested companies and nearly all of them are fronts, backs, subsidiaries or associates of ‘interested’ companies. Any government installing them in their health network system and advising people with tablets and mobile phones to comply will never fully know whatever they would be doing with the data passing through them; the government will know only bits and parcels of the operation.
The government suppressed medical data theft and tried to portray the end result as the cause!
So the government of Kerala installed an m-health application- most probably the cheapest one recommended by the greediest of the political cronies in the minister’s office- in their e-health project website. No sooner the e-health project was inaugurated on 26 January 2018 than the data thieves began their operation with the full blessings of the project’s political promoters. By the beginning of March 2018 more than ten million people’s personal and medical data had been collected in their app and successfully leaked out. The end result was a number of tablet computers which stored personal medical data of people becoming damaged or dysfunctional and most people’s data messed up and found to be mixed together or jumbled- the inevitable result of any clumsy hasty operations. The government tried many ways to portray this end result as the cause! Finding no other option the government stopped e-health data collection from 23 March 2018 and removed the m-health app from the e-health project’s website. The government suppressed this data theft but it came out in April 2018. On 10 April 2018 it was reported that the health department, under the direction of the health secretary, initiated an investigation on the irregularities in the e-health project and shared the people’s forewarned anxieties over insurance companies and medical companies acting behind and getting hold of this information for illegally using them.
On 11 April 2018 it was announced by the health secretary of the state that this e-health project which was officially launched on 26 January 2018 has succeeded in securing World Bank assistance as a project for the automation of hospital processes and collection and storage of electronic demographic and health data of the population, it would automate all health care and patient care activities in the state and link all government health institutions through a high bandwidth (reliable!) network, and will have a complete profile of every citizen living in Kerala in the end to enable surveillance of each and everyone’s diseases. He also admitted in not too many words that this project would use the insecure Aadhaar unique identification number of citizens, it would be implemented first in the rural areas where there will be the least resistance, and there could be no guarantee as to the protection of personal identifiable data and privacy in the new massive data repository to be set up.
On 10 January 2019 the health minister announced that 14 million of the 35 million population of Kerala had already been brought to the digital health platform, 79 of the 170 Family Health Centres had been digitized, e-health was being extended to all districts and all government medical colleges, outpatient registration, clinical examination and administration were working on the e-Health software, and that hospitals were going patient-friendly and paperless. Six months later, on 15 may 2019, the health minister announced that 20 million people had been covered under e-health, hard copies of patient records are going extinct, diagnosis and treatment are done from soft copies available in computers and the system, and that patients were being given virtual tokens for doctor consultation with appointment time marked.
If corona data collection had to be assigned to a foreign firm, then what were the HP Enterprises India and the Government E-Health Project doing in Kerala?
The three people in Kerala who most claimed in media that the e-health project of Kerala which was in operation since 2014 is a great success were Mr. Pinarayi Vijayan, the Chief Minister of Kerala, Smt. K K Shylaja, the Health Minister of Kerala, and Mr. Rajiv Sadanandan, the Health Secretary. If what they claimed was true, by 2020 Kerala must have had a vast repository of people’s demographic and medical data covering some 33 million residents in Kerala. Or are they jokers? When the corona virus broke out in the beginning of 2020, the Kerala government was seen engaged in busily setting up data banks of demographic and medical details of all people of Kerala with foreign assistance. Then how was the e-health project of Kerala which has been in operation since 2014 a success? Moreover, these three people separated corona monitoring from e-health to avoid the question why there was not enough data in e-health demographic-wise and medical-wise to cater to the needs of corona monitoring, and if not, why were they claiming the e-health project was a success. In fact the e-health project was a thorough failure in spite of bringing in and assigning the job of setting up the data repository to the famed HP Enterprises in 2015. Even HP Enterprises India’s Vice President & General Manager Marshal Correia on 27 July 2015 publicly announced that ‘they were assigned the job of creating an e-Health IT platform for Kerala, electronically linking 1,000 government health centres, 200 hospitals and 3 medical colleges across the state, to provide healthcare to 33 million citizens, and coordinating all public health programmes, medical inventories, electronic medical records and hospital management information systems in the state.’ In their own admission their duty in this deal was ‘to provide the core technology and mobile applications for capturing all activities and processes of patient care, compile and store and analyze the medical data and report them, provide centralized monitoring and management, e-clinical services and disease surveillance, and do medical research’. If in 2020 corona data collection and care had to be assigned to a foreign American firm then what were the HP Enterprises India and the Government E-Health Project doing in Kerala?
(UNDER EDIT. WILL CONTINUE….)
Images Courtesy: Pixabay.
Written and first published in: May 2020
FROM THE BOOK:
Buy:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087CY5D78
Tags:
English Essays Articles,
About the Author P. S. Remesh Chandran:
Face Book: https://www.facebook.com/psremeshchandra.trivandrum
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PSRemeshChandra
You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/user/bloombooks/videos
Blog: http://sahyadribooks-remesh.blogspot.com/
Site: https://sites.google.com/site/timeuponmywindowsill/
E-Mail: bloombookstvm@gmail.com
Post: P. S. Remesh Chandran, Editor, Sahyadri Books, Trivandrum, Padmalayam, Nanniyode, Pacha Post, Trivandrum- 695562, Kerala State, South India.
Kerala’s corona electronic medical data deal ends in shambles
P. S. Remesh Chandran
Editor, Sahyadri Books & Bloom Books, Trivandrum
1
The first corona virus case in the world was reported in China towards the end of 2019. The first corona virus case in India was reported in Kerala in Trichur in Kerala when a student traveling from Wuhan in China to India reached the native town on 01 January 2020. Soon many people came from foreign countries carrying this disease and people in Kerala began to be affected from them. As the number of cases increased the health data of the people who came to Kerala from abroad and who came to Kerala from other states of India had to be collected and analyzed and a follow-up action charted. In addition to updating data on people either under observation or under treatment, the data on the health staff in the state engaged in disease control and treatment and interacting with them also had to be collected and analyzed to identify who would be next susceptible to be affected. Considering that around 2,00,000 people were under quarantine in Kerala during this period, it was not small data. It was enormous.
This data comprising of complete medical and personal data of the affected and the likely to be affected people of Kerala including their symptoms and health conditions, present and past diseases, their treatments present and past, and geo-positioned satellite tracking of all these people, not to mention details of their insurance coverage if any for treatment, collected at lower levels and sent upwards had to be processed and analyzed and decisions arrived at in each individual case and at the community level for which special tools had to be engaged.
To track patients, digital intelligence on them has to be created which is done by collecting patients’ structured and unstructured data and processing and analyzing them. Government needed software in the form of an App which could be downloaded into and made functional in the various devices including mobile phones, laptops and computers used by personnel from the field staff level to the master controlling centre level. Thus data would be collected by field staff and fed to the control centre and the control centre in its turn would process and analyze this data and inform the field staff what to do in each individual case and at the community level.
When the corona virus spread through Kerala during the months of February-March of 2020, the government had this immense data but ‘according to them’ had no know-how to process and meaningfully use it. The political commission agents in government came up with the name of a foreign data collection and processing service provider who in records agreed to provide this service free of cost under conditions for a few months. They were assigned the job and entrusted with the data which they were expected to receive and store in their server wherever it was. They were soon exposed and proved to have been illegally involved in the American presidential elections. The only justification the government had to offer was this company was founded by an American-resident Keralite and his services were offered free-of-cost.
A government can contract the help of private technology specialists if and only when governmental capabilities are not sufficient and contract foreign private technology specialists only if native private technology specialists are not available there for use. But a government overriding governmental and native capabilities and going after inferior and dubious foreign private ‘capabilities’ who have practically no experience in health care was what the Kerala government did in its Sprinklr deal. Knowing well in advance that the nefarious data transfers in this deal in future may result in legal litigation, to escape Indian courts, the government also agreed to the law governing jurisdiction being fixed as New York. This law-breaking tendency of the people in government was clear indication of the breaking of many laws by its collaborating company itself on their part in future in that they were hoping the government would be functioning as the collector and the company as the seller, an experienced seller, of the data. The mutual benefit would be the people in government- that is the political commission agents associated with or in the ruling party of the government- would be unburdened with the complexities of selling the data and the company would be relieved of the huge expenses of collecting the huge data.
One thing which must be noted here is that though collection and processing of health data by electronic means is what is called e-health, the government, the media and everyone associated with this undercover deal carefully avoided using the name e-health. They called it everything but e-health, keeping the already much publicized and expensive e-health project of Kerala out of the picture and keeping it in reserve for more lucrative other deals in future before the term of government expires in a few months.
Medical data stored in a server can be misused or lost due to a multitude of reasons. Discussing the data outside of the office and business associates breaching privacy, security and data confidentiality are common. Phones, laptops and USB devices attached to using the data can be lost or stolen, hack-wares may invade and mal-wares run. Improper security safeguards and lack of ample access controls may lead to data unauthorizedly accessed, stolen, misused or sold. The security protocols may have purposefully inbuilt loopholes to override administrative, technical and physical safeguards in the system and drain data onto the black market where it will get on average three times more of important and confidential financial data and be used for thousands of purposes by hundreds of companies and individuals including blackmailers and ransom seekers.
Instead of the minimum data needed for the execution of a given assignment, the bulk of the data in the repository could be made to be exposed to an accessing person who could sell it piecemeal on who-needs what-basis to be used for a wide variety of companies and individuals. Employers of firms may want confidential medical data of staff and will pay handsomely for getting hold of that information. The amount that changes hands will always be many times higher than the legal fine for that information unauthorizedly changing hands if detected.
The National Informatics Centre is India’s prime and paramount institution in the IT sector, far experienced and credible compared to its foreign competitors, and the most ideal IT tool and the biggest data analytics platform in India for the various Indian states to crunch the personal health information of citizens collected by field workers. While this institution’s services were available without the hassle of the data being stolen and misused by foreign agencies when the corona virus threat was becoming a reality in India, the Kerala government ignoring this national institution approached an American-based and controversial- controversial in being illegally involved in the American presidential elections and facing prosecution there- firm to receive, store and process the health data the state was collecting from citizens in connection with the corona defense. When this deal came to public light and the government’s motivation for this deal was questioned, the Chief Minister of the state, Comrade Mr. Pinarayi Vijayan told that this American company was offering its services free, the state had no other companies accessible or available at the time, and the government had proprietary rights over the health data collected electronically which will be protected and will never be misused or monetized by this American company. He also emphasized the fact that this company was run by a Malayali as if all Malayalis are clean!
Many large multinational hospital chains which operate even within India have excellent electronic patient data management systems which already handle very big data collected in real time from patients, analyzes it in no time, and tell doctors and nurses what to do. Their systems manage millions of patients at one time and it is very strange that the Kerala government did not approach any of them for help to handle a large volume of data when an epidemic began to make its sweep in Kerala.
This company was till then only a social media management company providing apps and software for social media management. They were never experienced in managing massive health data from hundred thousands of people. It was their first attempt of this kind and one or two of their software was modified to accommodate the health data collection and processing needs of the Kerala government. They were using Kerala government as a stepping stone in to big health data management. Had this deal originated in any other state in India it would not have ended in controversy. The people of Kerala- the highest literate state in India- are unique in that they view suspiciously any data storage system, especially health data collection and storage, and if it is handed over to and stored by a private company as highly suspicious. The perpetrators of this deal did not consider this mindset of the people in Kerala whose data was what they were going to collect and as a result this deal became controversial and a topic of public debate. As a result the trustworthiness and honesty of this data collection was lost and people of Kerala are now doubly suspicious. Remember that the crowd of IT experts and net investigators and net hackers on the right side of law in India and in the world are a large part Keralites and they are now vigilant enough to detect where and when this data resurfaces and is made use of commercially by parties who were never signatories to this agreement between Kerala government and a foreign company on behalf of Kerala people.
Why should their services be free under conditions of course at least for a time? It is because they are in possession of the data free. Any insurance company would be eager to get hold of this data to learn in advance which of their policy holders had which of the diseases before taking their insurance policy so that they can deny payment of medical expenses saying, and also proving, that the policy holder concealed information on treatments of previous diseases. If they escape payment of 2,00,000 rupees of medical coverage and had to pay 50,000 rupees for getting hold of information on that particular case, still they had made a very handsome profit. Think how elaborate and efficient medical data theft would be and is! Of course the service provider can offer their services to government free. What is most important for them is access to the data which they get free anyway.
2
In government’s opinion manual processes of medical care which were generating thousands of medical records which were dispersed across several different locations were creating problems. The meaning: A person or a company sitting at or situated at Bombay or New York cannot now see the medical records in the General Hospital or the Medical College, Trivandrum. Therefore every medical record should be kept in the electronic form, uploaded in real time to a central data base, and stored there to be available to anyone from anywhere to see.
HP Enterprise Services India officially announced on 27 July 2015 that they were selected as partners in the e-health project of Kerala by the Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Kerala, for providing the core technology, applications, various online and real time services, and collect, store, analyze and research medical data. The HP was to be in partnership with JK Technosoft in this deal with the Kerala Government. The e-clinical services they offered included online prescription, online diagnostics and online imaging, the data and images they all generated going to their dynamically updated central universal database in a cloud server and accessible to doctors from anywhere on a need-only-basis. The idea was, once HP takes care of the responsibility of data collection and monitoring of treatment, doctors can access their data repository, get real-time advice and focus on patients better and take care of treatments more efficiently.
How this e-health will be working in hospitals is in more or less this way: All the people above 30 will be invited to screen for hypertension and diabetes, records will be created of those tested positive, their current medications noted, and they will be notified in their mobile phones after three months to go check their blood pressure and sugar levels again, all data fed into the central data bank under unique identification. The concept is these persons using their biometric authentication can go to any hospital and for the doctors there access on the desktops or other devices there their demographic and medical data by the help of the authorized employee in that institution. Other diseases detected will have other similar sub data bases from which other regimens will be advised to the patients through their doctors.
The mobile health world of 32000 apps and 28 billion US dollars as assets!
The m-health or mobile health apps are the new applications for collecting and stealing medical data. Their projected value in 2018 was 28 billion US dollars. More than 200 mobile health apps are added to the worldwide app stores each day and as of now 320,000 of them are available to download and install in websites, tablet computers and mobile phones now. Ninety percent of these are created exclusively for the purpose of stealing medical data of people for various interested companies and nearly all of them are fronts, backs, subsidiaries or associates of ‘interested’ companies. Any government installing them in their health network system and advising people with tablets and mobile phones to comply will never fully know whatever they would be doing with the data passing through them; the government will know only bits and parcels of the operation.
The government suppressed medical data theft and tried to portray the end result as the cause!
So the government of Kerala installed an m-health application- most probably the cheapest one recommended by the greediest of the political cronies in the minister’s office- in their e-health project website. No sooner the e-health project was inaugurated on 26 January 2018 than the data thieves began their operation with the full blessings of the project’s political promoters. By the beginning of March 2018 more than ten million people’s personal and medical data had been collected in their app and successfully leaked out. The end result was a number of tablet computers which stored personal medical data of people becoming damaged or dysfunctional and most people’s data messed up and found to be mixed together or jumbled- the inevitable result of any clumsy hasty operations. The government tried many ways to portray this end result as the cause! Finding no other option the government stopped e-health data collection from 23 March 2018 and removed the m-health app from the e-health project’s website. The government suppressed this data theft but it came out in April 2018. On 10 April 2018 it was reported that the health department, under the direction of the health secretary, initiated an investigation on the irregularities in the e-health project and shared the people’s forewarned anxieties over insurance companies and medical companies acting behind and getting hold of this information for illegally using them.
On 11 April 2018 it was announced by the health secretary of the state that this e-health project which was officially launched on 26 January 2018 has succeeded in securing World Bank assistance as a project for the automation of hospital processes and collection and storage of electronic demographic and health data of the population, it would automate all health care and patient care activities in the state and link all government health institutions through a high bandwidth (reliable!) network, and will have a complete profile of every citizen living in Kerala in the end to enable surveillance of each and everyone’s diseases. He also admitted in not too many words that this project would use the insecure Aadhaar unique identification number of citizens, it would be implemented first in the rural areas where there will be the least resistance, and there could be no guarantee as to the protection of personal identifiable data and privacy in the new massive data repository to be set up.
On 10 January 2019 the health minister announced that 14 million of the 35 million population of Kerala had already been brought to the digital health platform, 79 of the 170 Family Health Centres had been digitized, e-health was being extended to all districts and all government medical colleges, outpatient registration, clinical examination and administration were working on the e-Health software, and that hospitals were going patient-friendly and paperless. Six months later, on 15 may 2019, the health minister announced that 20 million people had been covered under e-health, hard copies of patient records are going extinct, diagnosis and treatment are done from soft copies available in computers and the system, and that patients were being given virtual tokens for doctor consultation with appointment time marked.
If corona data collection had to be assigned to a foreign firm, then what were the HP Enterprises India and the Government E-Health Project doing in Kerala?
The three people in Kerala who most claimed in media that the e-health project of Kerala which was in operation since 2014 is a great success were Mr. Pinarayi Vijayan, the Chief Minister of Kerala, Smt. K K Shylaja, the Health Minister of Kerala, and Mr. Rajiv Sadanandan, the Health Secretary. If what they claimed was true, by 2020 Kerala must have had a vast repository of people’s demographic and medical data covering some 33 million residents in Kerala. Or are they jokers? When the corona virus broke out in the beginning of 2020, the Kerala government was seen engaged in busily setting up data banks of demographic and medical details of all people of Kerala with foreign assistance. Then how was the e-health project of Kerala which has been in operation since 2014 a success? Moreover, these three people separated corona monitoring from e-health to avoid the question why there was not enough data in e-health demographic-wise and medical-wise to cater to the needs of corona monitoring, and if not, why were they claiming the e-health project was a success. In fact the e-health project was a thorough failure in spite of bringing in and assigning the job of setting up the data repository to the famed HP Enterprises in 2015. Even HP Enterprises India’s Vice President & General Manager Marshal Correia on 27 July 2015 publicly announced that ‘they were assigned the job of creating an e-Health IT platform for Kerala, electronically linking 1,000 government health centres, 200 hospitals and 3 medical colleges across the state, to provide healthcare to 33 million citizens, and coordinating all public health programmes, medical inventories, electronic medical records and hospital management information systems in the state.’ In their own admission their duty in this deal was ‘to provide the core technology and mobile applications for capturing all activities and processes of patient care, compile and store and analyze the medical data and report them, provide centralized monitoring and management, e-clinical services and disease surveillance, and do medical research’. If in 2020 corona data collection and care had to be assigned to a foreign American firm then what were the HP Enterprises India and the Government E-Health Project doing in Kerala?
(UNDER EDIT. WILL CONTINUE….)
Images Courtesy: Pixabay.
Written and first published in: May 2020
FROM THE BOOK:
Tags:
English Essays Articles,
About the Author P. S. Remesh Chandran:
Author Profile Of P S Remesh Chandran By Sahyadri Archives.
Editor
of Sahyadri Books & Bloom Books, Trivandrum. Author of several
books in English and in Malayalam. And also author of Swan: The
Intelligent Picture Book. Born and brought up in the beautiful village
of Nanniyode in the Sahya Mountain Valley in Trivandrum, in Kerala.
Father British Council trained English teacher and Mother University
educated. Matriculation with distinction and Pre Degree Studies in
Science with National Merit Scholarship. Discontinued Diploma studies in
Electronics and entered politics. Unmarried and single.
Face Book: https://www.facebook.com/psremeshchandra.trivandrum
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PSRemeshChandra
You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/user/bloombooks/videos
Blog: http://sahyadribooks-remesh.blogspot.com/
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Post: P. S. Remesh Chandran, Editor, Sahyadri Books, Trivandrum, Padmalayam, Nanniyode, Pacha Post, Trivandrum- 695562, Kerala State, South India.
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