6
Sevagram goes Digital
Technology with a human face
Hospitals run on far more than doctors and medicines. They run on information—who the patient is, what happened yesterday, what the report showed, which drug was given, what was billed, and what still needs to be done. In Sevagram, for decades, that information lived on paper: registers, slips, files, carbon copies, and handwriting that could be elegant one day and illegible the next. The system worked, but it worked with friction. It depended on memory, on messengers, on people running from counter to counter, and on patients carrying their medical history in a cloth bag like a fragile inheritance.
This chapter is the story of how that paper world began to shift—slowly, imperfectly—towards a digital one. It is not a tale of technology as triumph. It is a tale of technology as disruption: of early mornings, stubborn routines, skeptical colleagues, and staff members who were asked to change the way they worked while the hospital continued to run at full speed. At its centre is Bhavana, who stepped into the world of computers long before it became fashionable, and stayed with it when it was inconvenient, exhausting, and thankless. Along the way, you will meet unexpected allies, reluctant departments, overworked residents, and the quiet heroes of the hospital—the clerks, technicians, nurses, and attendants—whose hands actually carried the change.
Over the next pages, I will take you from a 3 a.m. train to Nagpur to a small room near the OPD where FoxPro ran on a blue screen, from a revealing visit to SGPGI Lucknow to a Delhi library where a government file quietly turned into Sevagram’s most ambitious experiment. You will see the messy middle too: cables laid in secrecy, servers that crawled, transactions that failed, and the uncomfortable phase when paper and computers had to coexist like uneasy roommates. If this story holds together, it is not because everything went smoothly, but because enough people kept pushing the wheel forward, even when it wobbled—until a hospital that once depended on files and footsteps began to breathe through data.