Health System

Monitoring System

2004 1986 2006

Background:

Surat is one of the fastest growing cities in India. With the increase in the municipal jurisdiction area and development/improvement of the local/regional economy base, more people are attracted to the city, which also claims as “zero unemployment city”. The population increase for the decade of 1991-2001 for the city has been recorded as more than 60%.

Population Growth:

Growth of City area:

This increase in population has led to: Increase in demand on efficient urban infrastructure and services Needs of improving the monitoring and the complaint system Requirement of adopting the Urban Service Level Benchmarking (SLB) on basic services for evaluating

the performance of infrastructure projects funded under various National programmes

SMC’s initiatives:

1. Introduction of m - Governance Concept

2. Target to introduce a mobile and internet based monitoring and complaints sys tem, with following objectives.

to reduce paperwork and increase efficiency of the services.

to increase capacity of SMC in monitoring and management of ur ban services in near real time.

to provide better services to people.

to enhance capacity in developing strategies and build resilience to current and future risks

Current System:

The current monitoring system is mainly based on surveys carried out manually.

The information collected within these surveys are based on paper based questionnaires/format. This process of information collection, storage and analysis is cumbersome and time consuming.

The current system hinders the possibility of near real-time decision making due to bottlenecks within collection, data entry, validation, and information dissemination.

SMC has initiated the complaints registration by introducing phone based and Internet based complaints systems. However, the system can be further improved significantly by introducing structured mobile based system which uses SMS. This process can reduce the extra human resources required for data entry and quality check of redressal process which could be utilized for monitoring the performance of the system.

ACCCRN Intervention:

As a part of ACCCRN Initiatives, TARU conceptualized & proposed to aid in establishing a Short Message Service (SMS) enabled “Urban Services Monitoring System” – UrSMS.

The main objective of the UrSMS is to elevate the existing complaint & monitoring system to a much advanced as well as involving people-participation.

The main feature of the system is designed

To enable SMC officials to view the map, data and relevant statistics on near real time basis. To enable decision makers to evaluate the performance and bottlenecks at various levels to take timely

action.

The UrSMS has two components

1) Services Monitoring System and

2) Complaint System

System Description:

The Urban Services Monitoring System (UrSMS) is designed on an efficient platform. The system has two main interfaces:

1) The mobile interface for sending and receiving structured data via SMS 2) PC interface with Internet Mapping Service for visualizing the information as charts, reports and maps.

The key difference between this system and other existing system is the use of structured form based interface for ease in data collection and also facilitate the data storage, sorting and analysis.

System components:

Water supply complaint system Door to Door – Solid waste collection complaint system Drainage & Sewerage complaints system Water distribution quality monitoring system Health monitoring system

Implementation

The complaint systems were implemented in one ward. The training for using the system was provided to the municipal corporation officers and the necessary software uploaded to citizens (sample population) living in that area.

In case of the monitoring system, the training was provided to the municipal corporation officers and the necessary software's were provided to them to be distributed to all stakeholders at their discretion.

Both the systems were tested for an initial period of six months. During this period improvements to the interface, functionality and reporting mechanisms were improved based on the user inputs. Additional reports were also designed to incorporate the reporting mechanism of the departments.

Outcomes:

The complaint system in spite of its ease and usability did not prove to be of success. Since the system was implemented in only one ward there were problems in integration within the business as usual scenario. The municipal officers generally handle more than one ward at any given time due to shortage in staff (an average of 1 staff catering to 1,000 citizens). This scenario compelled them in following two different systems one using UrSMS which was comfortable but not usable beyond one ward (remaining wards still followed the paper based system). Further, the zonal reports on a weekly basis is also usually hand written and in spite of the digitization of information due to UrSMS the officers usually duplicated the efforts by manually creating the reports in order to include the figures from all wards within the zone.

The water distribution and health monitoring system has been a success. The water distribution monitoring system is currently functional within three out of the four distribution stations. The system is expected to be implemented within all stations within this year. The health monitoring system is currently collecting information from around 470 hospitals, urban health centers, private hospitals and private clinics. The total number of inpatient and outpatient cases currently monitored exceeds over 100,000 and increasing at the rater of 7,000 every month. The number of leptospirosis (a bacterial infection that occurs when people are exposed to certain environments) which was increasing over the last one decade due to uncontrolled migration within the city has decreased in the city for the first time due the introduction of this monitoring mechanism. Due to the UrSMS the health department is able to track the outbreak of the infection and is able to take the required control measures.

Ways forward :

This pilot project aims towards improving the monitoring and grievance redressal system of Municipal services, which can also be used as an emergency two way monitoring system during flood emergencies like floods. TARU is currently advocating the municipality to use the complaint redressal system across all zones and wards to reduce the problem of redundancy. On the other hand the success of health and water monitoring system within Surat has encouraged other partner cities e.g. Indore towards adapting the system.

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TARU Leading Edge

Urban Service Monitoring System (UrSMS) Authors: Umamaheshwaran Rajasekar1, Gopalakrishna Bhat1, Anup Karanth1

1 TARU Leading Edge, Gandhinagar, India

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