Stale data on Karnataka govt's live bed-tracking dashboard leaves many confused

Is the Karnataka government's live bed-tracking dashboard really 'live' in the real sense of the term? It was dubbed as the panacea of all problems related to bed allocation because now citizens can see exactly where beds are vacant and end up in those hospitals without wasting a minute. Not really.

Multiple hospitals that DH spoke to said they have technical issues with the SAST (Suvarna Arogya Suraksha Trust) portal in which they enter data on incoming patients with a gap of a few hours. This data is taken and displayed on the live bed-tracking dashboard of the BBMP which is accessible to the public at www.chbms.bbmpgov.in/portal/reports. The question is when the hospitals are not able to give inputs at all owing to IT issues how is the dashboard in 'real-time'?

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Dr Harshit M, an emergency physician in a city-based hospital, which he did not want to name, said, "The dashboard shows ICU beds are available but when you look at which hospital the bed is in, then the dashboard stops working. If you call 1912, they say there are no ICU beds. But when you tell them that the dashboard shows beds are available they say they don't have any such information. When you call the contact number on the dashboard which is 080-22660000, no one picks up the phone even though we held on for more than 30 minutes. Basically, the dashboard looks very rosy and seems like there is no bed problem in the city but when I want an ICU bed for my patient then it is not available anywhere."

On Thursday evening, the dashboard said MS Ramaiah Narayana Heart Centre and MS Ramaiah Hospital have 32 and nine beds vacant, respectively. Shalini Pradeep, the nodal officer for coordinating with various government agencies about the hospital's bed strength, when asked about the figures displayed on the dashboard said they are wrong.

"We update to the BBMP war room, the directorate of medical education, private and government medical colleges WhatsApp group about the number of available beds. The SAST portal just doesn't open. The BBMP portal imports data from the SAST portal. The SAST portal has not been rectified in spite of repeated calls to the IT project manager from Friday," she said.

Dr B Manjunath, Director of Medical Management, Suvarna Arogya Suraksha Trust (SAST), said, "Our IT project manager is the one who developed the portal. We have integrated it with the BBMP dashboard. We are working on technical glitches."

"We have 214 Covid patients. Nothing can be edited on the SAST dashboard. The same is being exported to BBMP portal. Even an Arogya Mitra who came today to the hospital could not rectify the glitches," Shalini said.

Dr Kailash N, Medical Superintendent, Akash Hospital, Devanahalli said, "We are having a lot of problems with the SAST portal. We upload something, it reflects something else altogether. Sometimes, it changes by itself. There is a lot of confusion and a lot of people call asking for beds and we have to deny. We have to tell them there are no beds."