FoxPro on a Blue Screen

A Door Opens at MGIMS

In March 1995, I went to Dhirubhai Mehta with a request that mattered to our family more than it may have sounded on paper.

Bhavana had finished her training. She had learned FoxPro—an old database language now, but powerful then. She had done the hard part. Now she needed a place to use it. Learning a skill is one thing; finding a space to practise it is another. In a town like ours, the second part is often harder.

Dhirubhai listened, and he did what he often did when he saw sincerity: he helped without drama. He spoke to Dr. Sushila Nayar, who agreed to appoint Bhavana in the hospital. There were no grand speeches about women empowerment, no declarations. It was simply a practical decision made by people who could recognize ability.

In April 1995, Bhavana joined MGIMS as a junior clerk.

Our children, Ashwini and Amrita, were nine and six.

Her “office” was not impressive. It was a small room near the registration OPD, close to the daily noise of patients, relatives, clerks, and confusion. Anyone who has spent time near an OPD registration counter knows the particular kind of chaos it produces—questions flying, tempers fraying, papers being pushed, someone always trying to jump the queue.

But for Bhavana, that room held something rare.

A computer.

From Handwriting to Legibility

In those days, discharge summaries were often handwritten scrawls. Some were detailed, some careless. Many were barely readable. For doctors, the discharge summary is a routine document, something you finish quickly at the end of an admission. For patients, that one sheet of paper is the story of their illness, the only evidence of what happened to them inside the hospital walls.

When handwriting is unclear, the patient suffers. The next doctor suffers. Even the same hospital suffers when the patient returns months later and nobody can decipher what was written earlier.

Bhavana began by computerising discharge summaries for the Medicine department. It was a small change, but it had a visible effect. Typed text looks honest. It looks accountable. It forces you to think in complete sentences. It also reduces the temptation to write vague phrases that mean everything and nothing.

Faculty members would dictate. Bhavana would type. A structured summary would emerge—clearer, cleaner, and easier to follow. People noticed. Not because it was glamorous, but because it was useful.

The hospital, like any institution, is full of people who don’t resist change itself. They resist inconvenience. When something saves time, reduces errors, and prevents embarrassment, it begins to earn its place quietly.

The Medical Store and the Hidden Chaos

After discharge summaries came the medical store. Inventory in hospitals has its own kind of confusion: missing stock, delayed supplies, expired medicines, manual registers that nobody trusts fully. In a paper system, the truth is always slightly negotiable. A number can be adjusted. A page can go missing. A shortage can be blamed on someone else.

Bhavana wrote small programs that brought some order to this. She did not “transform” the store overnight. She did not eliminate problems with a magical piece of software. But she introduced something important: a record that did not depend entirely on memory and handwriting.

She also developed software for Kasturba Vidya Mandir. That might seem like a side project, but it reflected her nature. Once she learned a tool, she wanted to apply it wherever it could reduce friction and confusion.

By October 1996, she was promoted to Computer Operator.

It wasn’t a dramatic rise. There were no ceremonies. But in a hospital that still ran on paper and carbon copies, Bhavana had become something uncommon: a person who could translate work into code.

The Blue Screen Years

FoxPro had a particular look that people of that era will remember: a blue screen, a blinking cursor, and the feeling that you were speaking to a machine in a language only a few understood. Bhavana’s screen became a small window into a different way of working.

It also changed the way people looked at her. A junior clerk is invisible in most institutions. A computer operator, even in a small room near OPD, begins to attract attention. People come to you with problems, not because they respect your designation, but because you can fix something they cannot.

And Bhavana fixed things patiently.

Not just the programs. She fixed small human anxieties too—the fear of touching the keyboard, the hesitation of pressing the wrong key, the embarrassment of not knowing what “Enter” meant. In a hospital, technology is never just technology. It is also psychology.

The Hidden Foundation

In retrospect, those FoxPro years did more than computerise a few tasks.

They trained Bhavana in something that would later decide the fate of the Hospital Information System. Not programming. Patience.

Because hospitals don’t change when you give them software. Hospitals change when people trust the person who brings it.

Bhavana learned how to listen to complaints without becoming defensive. She learned how to teach without humiliating. She learned how to persuade without preaching. She learned that the smallest staff member at the counter often understands workflow better than the senior faculty member who only signs the file.

Those were not “IT skills.” They were human skills.

And they would matter far more when the hospital tried to digitise not one room, but its entire bloodstream.

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