Uttar Pradesh sets up digital oxygen monitoring to track hospital demand, tanker location

As the country is grappling with the second wave of COVID-19 while facing an acute shortage of oxygen due to constraints of transportation, Uttar Pradesh became the first state to implement an oxygen monitoring system in order to track the demand for oxygen and ensure its supply in the quickest possible time by tracking the demand, supply and tracking the real-time location of the tankers.

Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Awanish Kumar Awasthi has said that the platform has been launched in collaboration with the food safety and drug administration, medical education department, medical health and family welfare department, transport and home departments and Rodic Consultants. 

While speaking with Republic Media Network, Managing Director of Rodic Consultants, Raj Kumar said, "The herculean task to design and digitise the system was done in 24 hours and within two days more than 40 tankers were tagged to the monitoring system".

"As the tankers were in different locations, it was not possible to call the tankers to one location to tag them to the system, hence our teams rushed to the tankers' locations and tagged them while they were on the move. It took just two minutes to add GPS systems to the oxygen tankers and they were off to their destination," Kumar said, while adding that about 58 tankers are running at the moment to supply oxygen to hospitals across the state.

"With the help of the system, you can virtually see where the tanker is with the driver's details and from which plant has it filled the oxygen. So if any hospital raises an SOS, the tanker nearest to the hospital can be sent to supply oxygen," Raj Kumar said.

Manish Tyagi, the Executive Director of Rodic Consultants said almost all the tankers will be tagged by Monday.

"We will achieve 95%-98% tagging by tomorrow, after which as and when the government will keep adding 2-3 tankers to the fleet of running tankers, we will tag them immediately and try to maintain 98% monitoring," Manish Tyagi said while adding that the state administration is in process of deploying more tankers on a regular basis to cater the increasing demand of oxygen amid the COVID-19 crisis.

"Awanish Awasthi Ji approved our idea in five minutes and made all the necessary arrangements for our team to begin our work. Since then we are working round the clock," Manish Tyagi said.

The setting up of supply-side monitoring has been looked after and the team is also working to digitise the demand side by taking the hospitals on to the monitoring system. "Within 3-5 days we will digitise the demands of 55 to 60 medical colleges and major hospitals in the state," Manish Tyagi said while adding that the system can be implemented across the country in three days if the Centre and States approve the idea.

Through this Management Information System's (MIS) daily live report on the movement of Oxygen tankers can be monitored and viewed on a map, Awanish Kumar Awasthi said while adding that software will analyse and inform if the tanker is delayed either in filling or during transportation.

According to the UP government's statement, states including Maharashtra, Punjab, Bihar and Tamil Nadu showed interest in the initiative. There will be better interstate coordination once other states implement the system, the statement read.

Uttar Pradesh on Saturday recorded its highest single-day spike in new infections and coronavirus-related deaths with 38,055 fresh cases and 223 fatalities, pushing the virus tally to 10,51,314 and the toll to 10,959.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath during a virtual interaction on Saturday with editors of different newspapers, said that there is no shortage of drugs like Remdesivir in Uttar Pradesh. When the demand increased, a state aircraft was sent to Ahmedabad and the drug was procured directly from the pharma company, he said while adding that nearly 8,000 centres have been set up where COVID-19 vaccines will be administered free of cost to all people above the age of 18 from May 1.