Centre monitoring every pregnant woman

PATNA: The growth of foetus in a pregnant women residing even in a remote village of Bihar or Karnataka is being recorded fortnightly by the Central government, thanks to the implementation of the health management information system (HMIS) early this year.

Giving details of this socially useful system launched for the first time in the country, PU statistics department head and organizing committee chairman of the 19th international conference of the Forum for Interdisciplinary Mathematics (FIM) Arun Kumar said here on Monday that the HMIS keeps the track of each pregnant woman in the country and monitors whether the woman is being visited by a doctor regularly and whether she is being administered daily dose of vitamins and iron pills. It also monitors whether a pregnant woman has been vaccinated properly.

The data are provided to the Central government by each state government on regular basis, he said.

Earlier, David Swanson of California University, US, in his paper on `Developing Small Area Population Estimates for Use in Health Information System', pointed out that the development of demographic data for use in health monitoring is not an easy task. The problem becomes all the more challenging when the information is needed for small areas. He further pointed out that the Hamilton-Perry Method and the Housing Unit Method together offer the possibilities of developing useful demographic detail for small areas.

G P Patil of Pennsylvania State University, US, deliberated on hotspot geoinformatics and said that this statistical tool can pinpoint the prevalence of some disease in a particular area.