Bengaluru South MP Tejasvi Surya, who had live streamed an ‘expose’ of an alleged scam in bed allotment for COVID-19 patients on May 6, said four reforms have been implemented in the software to prevent bed-blocking. This, he said, was a result of 100 hours of work put in by himself, a team of senior officers and tech architects sent by Nandan Nilekani, chairman, Infosys.
Cases unearthed till now reveal several asymptomatic patients in whose names beds were blocked did not even know beds were booked in their name. “To prevent this, patients and the hospital concerned will get an auto-generated SMS as soon as a bed is allotted to them,” Mr. Surya announced at a press conference on Monday.
An analysis of specific instances where beds were blocked show that they were manually changed to allot them to someone else later, at a price, as there was a window of 10 hours for the patient to report to the hospital. “The option to manually change bed allocation has been entirely dropped from the software, and the window from a bed being blocked to a patient reporting to a hospital has now been reduced to four hours,” he said. To bring accountability in bed allocation, the name of the person allotting a bed will be logged in with every bed allocation in the software, he added.
Mr. Surya said presently, there was no set transparent criteria for allotment of beds by the civic body. “We are evolving a queue system where a patient requesting a bed will be given a token number, and you can see your seniority in the queue. Meanwhile, if the condition of a patient worsens, they will shift to the queue for HDU or ICU beds,” he said.
The hospitals are also not reflecting discharge of patients in the system on time, which is also leading to bed-blocking. This will be corrected using an OTP or a biometric system, he said. “The two reforms will be implemented over the next 100 hours,” he added.
Did not communalise scam: Tejasvi Surya
Bengaluru South MP Tejasvi Surya denied communalising the alleged bed-blocking scam and claims that he did so was a “conspiracy by Congress and its ecosystem” to derail the probe into the scam.
“I read out a list of names given to me by a senior officer saying they were either sacked or taken off during restructuring. I only questioned on what basis they were recruited. I did not make any allegations against them,” he claimed.
Quizzed on the communally loaded statements made by MLAs Ravi Subramanya and Satish Reddy, he said he was answerable about only what he said.
Refusing to take any further questions, he accused journalists of ‘having an agenda’ and ended the press conference.
Representatives of Crystal Infosystems & Services and the civic body refused to comment on the issue.
However, Muslim youths, who were told not to report to work after his visit to the South zone war room, refuted his claims.
Sources among the Muslim youths named by Mr. Surya said they had no indication from the firm that they were being sacked or transferred before Mr. Surya read out their names.
“Most of those named by Mr. Surya were in the war room when he read out the names, making it evident that they had not been sacked,” said Ayesha, who was among those taken off work related to the war room.
Eleven of the 17 youths reported back for duty at the war room on Monday.
