Funding for Pilot Project and the Prototype System
Last updated
Last updated
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The National EMR project would be considerably cheaper than many other national programs; certainly, less expensive than the Aadhaar (UIDAI) project, and yet the returns could be as great, if not more.
We propose to undertake a pilot project to demonstrate the feasibility, cost estimates for a full scale version, and value of the NEMRS.
A rough estimate from projects of similar nature allows us to estimate that the software development and the infrastructure for the pilot testing with 30 healthcare centers across the country, would cost approximately 45 crore rupees. This money would allow creating a development team to launch the open source project, and integrate the require standards, and define the APIs and specifications for different core components. It will also go toward equipping the health centers and the personnel with the necessary hardware, devices and software. A team of experts, including doctors, healthcare policy pundits, and IT visionaries would be assembled as an advisory board.
The project would deliver a fully working system within a period of 18 months, and over an overlapping period of 18 months would be tested at 30 PHCs across country, half of which would be under the jurisdiction of CHCs, (with CHCs and PHCs considered a unit for testing purposes).
A study would be commissioned to assess the impact, in terms of health outcomes, efficiency and economic criteria. The study would proceed simultaneously with the ongoing development.
Based on the results and the lessons learned from the pilot project, the National EMR could be quickly extended to cover much of the country. The access to the system would be made available to all private health facilities.
Since much of the core development work would have been done in the initial period of 1.5 years, the cost of subsequent scaling to cover other locations would be a much smaller. As the plan is to move it to public-private partnered control, much of these costs will be absorbed by private investments. The private organizations may be subsidized by the government but their actual profits will come from services to the private organization for deployment and customization for their locations.