The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is developing a real time bed availability dashboard for all its civic hospitals, including major tertiary care centres, peripheral hospitals, and maternity facilities. The dashboard will display live updates on general beds as well as critical care capacity (ICU and NICU), helping patients and referring doctors quickly locate available beds without making multiple calls.
Glimpse:
The system is currently under testing and is expected to go live soon. It forms part of a broader digital and infrastructure modernisation drive that includes a centralised digital platform, procurement reforms through the GeM portal, improved medicine availability, and stricter oversight of public private partnerships. The initiative draws lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic when real-time visibility of hospital resources was critical for patient triage and movement.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is modernising Mumbai’s civic hospital network with a major push towards digital infrastructure and improved patient services. A key highlight of this upgrade is the development of a real time bed availability dashboard that will provide live information on bed occupancy across the city’s public hospitals.
Once operational, citizens, caregivers, and referring facilities will be able to check availability of general beds, ICU beds, and NICU beds with a single click. This will eliminate the current practice of calling multiple hospitals individually, significantly reducing admission delays especially during emergencies. The dashboard will cover flagship institutions such as KEM Hospital, Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital, and Cooper Hospital, along with peripheral hospitals and maternity homes.
The bed dashboard is part of a larger modernisation plan that includes creating a centralised digital platform, routing medical equipment and medicine purchases through the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) for greater transparency, strengthening peripheral hospitals into multi speciality facilities, and improving overall hygiene and patient amenities (including dedicated toilets for relatives).
BMC officials noted that the initiative will help optimise asset utilisation, reduce pressure on central hospitals, and ensure faster patient movement. The system is currently under testing, with plans to make it fully operational in the near future.
“At present, patients and hospital administration have to call each hospital and ask if a bed is available, especially in cases of ICU and NICU. With this dashboard, anyone will be able to check bed availability and can move the patients immediately without wasting time.”
By
HB Team
