Much of the clinical work in CURE’s hospitals used to run on paper, with notes written by hand, carried between departments and re-entered later. Each hospital also has its own specialties, infrastructure and staffing.
Thoughtworks worked with the non-profit to modernize and standardize their systems to digitally document all their patient clinical care journeys. The partners customized and deployed Bahmni across CURE’s network.
The latest rollout builds on a partnership that began in 2023, when CURE first engaged Thoughtworks to digitize care in its children’s hospitals. Thoughtworks’ Managed Services team continues to run deployments and day-to-day operations across the network.
“Taking eight hospitals from paper to digital without interrupting care is a monumental challenge,” said Kevin de Smidt, Chief Technology Officer at CURE International. “The Thoughtworks team learned how our clinicians actually work, allowing us to roll out a system that lets our teams spend less time chasing paperwork and more time focused on providing world-class surgical care to the children we serve. Because we built this on Bahmni, these EMR enhancements are going back into the open-source project, ensuring the next low-resource hospital starts further ahead than we did.”
To give clinicians reliable digital tools in every hospital, the work focused on four priority areas:
- Safer clinical care: Adding high-visibility alerts for allergies and the need for blood crossmatching, supervisor approval for changes to medication records, dosing guidance linked to each child’s weight and a new variable dose protocol.
- Less administrative work on the ward: Introducing electronic drug charts, automated nursing tasks and ward-level inpatient dashboards. A routine medication round now takes three clicks instead of seven.
- Better use of operating theaters: Tracking each patient’s surgical readiness in real time and suggesting a replacement patient when a scheduled surgery can’t go ahead.
- Reliable operations without disrupting care: Upgrading the platform that helped deployments reach each site 60% faster and causing 45% less disruption to patient services.
“Executing a multi-region clinical rollout across eight global hospitals demands absolute operational resilience,” said Steve Obana, Senior Vice President – Life Sciences & MedTech at Thoughtworks. “Healthcare platforms operating in these environments cannot afford downtime or instability. Our team approached this with rigorous engineering discipline and we are proud to provide the managed services backbone and technical stability that allows CURE’s medical teams to scale their life-changing work with absolute confidence in their systems.”
CURE has extended its managed services support with Thoughtworks for a further year, covering platform upgrades, stability and operations across all eight hospitals.
Features built for CURE, including inpatient care and monitoring and a digital medication administration record, are being contributed back to the core Bahmni project. This makes them available to other hospitals deploying the platform in low-resource settings.
By combining its experience building Bahmni with managed services operations, Thoughtworks is helping CURE International deliver technology that works where it matters most: giving clinicians reliable tools and information to provide safe, effective care for every child.
