Dialog Axiata & Wavenet Donate a National Patient Bed Management System to the Health Ministry to Manage COVID-19 Patients

L to R: Dr. Lal Panapitiya, Deputy Director Medical Services, Dr. Sunil De Alwis, Additional Secretary, (Medical Services), Dr. Asela Gunewardena, Director General of Health Services, Hon (Mrs.) Pavithra Devi Wanniarachchi, Minister of Health, Dr. Anver Hamdani, Director/Medical Technological services, Ministry Coordinator Incharge COVID-19, Hon. (Prof.) Channa Jayasumana, State, Minister of Production, Supply and Regulation of Pharmaceuticals, Mr. Supun Weerasinghe, Group Chief Executive, Dialog Axiata PLC, Mr. Suren Pinto, Chief Executive Officer, Wavenet International, Mr. Reza Aniff, Head Of Digital Services, Dialog Axiata PLC, and Mr. Dilum Kumarasinghe - Senior Vice President, Wavenet International

In its continued efforts to support the national endeavours in mitigating the pandemic, Sri Lanka’s premier connectivity provider, Dialog Axiata PLC together with its technology partner Wavenet International (Pvt) Ltd donated a National Patient Bed Management Solution to the Ministry of Health to efficiently distribute patients to treatment centres and minimise admission time.

This solution will enable a centralised and real-time bed management system at Government and private COVID-19 treatment centres governed by the Ministry of Health. This will further result in shorter bed turnover time and waiting time for patients while also improving the efficiency for healthcare providers to focus on patient care instead of checking on the availability of beds. The Patient Bed Management Solution eliminates the overlap of information and inefficiencies in allocating patients to respective centres. Officials will now have an overview of the exact availability of beds by locality and treatment centre, thereby improving the time taken for admitting patients while providing a faster and efficient method for ambulatory services to handover patients to the respective centre and mobilise towards the next patient in need without delays.

The system consolidates information from Regional Health Units and other Ministry of Health initiatives with the ability to view and allocate patients conveniently by the central command centre or decentralised units based on the requests received from authorised entities. This solution aims to significantly aid the national healthcare system by digitising and automating the manual process of the patient bed allocation, thereby greatly benefitting healthcare administrators, frontline professionals and those in their care.

Speaking on this occasion, Dr. Anver Hamdani, Director Medical Technological Services and Ministry Coordinator in charge of COVID-19 stated, “To date, the Ministry of Health has roughly 32,500 patient managing beds for COVID-19 patients and for all this time 224 centres were managed manually with human efforts being used for time-consuming tasks like patient entering, deployment, monitoring and discharging. On behalf of the Ministry of Health, we are grateful to Dialog Axiata and Wavenet for donating a national system for real-time patient bed management. The bed management system will be an asset to the country not only for COVID-19 but also for ICU management and specialised care management as it will give healthcare workers a real-time and centralised system to cater and provide the best care for every Sri Lankan”.

Commenting, Suren Pinto, CEO of Global Wavenet stated “We take great pride in teaming up with Dialog to be the technology partner on this occasion. It is a testimonial of our commitment towards advancing the healthcare technology space in the country.”

Commenting, Supun Weerasinghe, Group Chief Executive of Dialog Axiata PLC said, “We are thankful to the Ministry of Health for giving us this opportunity to further support health care providers with their COVID-19 mitigation efforts. We are thankful to our technology partner Wavenet International, whose efforts have enabled us to further support those affected by COVID-19 in a time of crisis”.