The health department has asked all hospitals treating Covid-19 patients to ensure that the vital signs of all admitted to intensive care units, cardiac care units and high dependency units are uploaded on the Covid Patient Management System four times a day.

The circular, sent to all government and private hospitals, says the vital parameters of critical patients have to be uploaded twice a day and those of others, once a day.

The data will have to be fed into the patient monitoring score in the newly-launched software — Covid Patient Management System.

Senior health department officials said the directive comes at a time when several hospitals were allegedly failing to upload the details, leaving a team of experts at Sasthya Bhavan in the dark about the condition of critically ill Covid-19 patients across the state.

“Unless the parameters are uploaded, it is not possible to monitor whether a hospital is regularly checking all the vital parameters of a patient in ICU, such as his or her oxygen saturation level in the blood and electrolyte balance,” said a senior health department official.

“Our team of experts wouldn’t know if a patient is getting the proper treatment or is fit enough to be moved out of the ICU.”

A team of experts from the health department observed while visiting various Covid hospitals recently that nurses assigned the task of feeding information into the new software were not doing so at regular intervals.

In a few cases, patients who could be moved out of ICUs were being kept back because the doctors were not ready to take the responsibility of continuous monitoring in wards.

As a result relatives of patients were unable to ascertain their status online.