The beginning
It may be a while before you get a prescription to correct your heartbeat via your mobile phone, but major Indian hospitals are initiating steps on this journey by implementing hospital information systems (HIS). HIS are evolving from order entry systems, administrative systems and departmental subsystems to one solution that is the hospital's ERP besides Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) is also being used.

Corporate hospitals such as Apollo Hospitals, Escorts Hospital & Research Centre, Wockhardt, Fortis, and Max Healthcare are pioneering this change. Apollo is credited with being the first hospital to setup a rural telemedicine center in 1999. Escorts is among the first of its kind in India to provide remote yet instant cardiac attention. Wockhardt has put up an IT infrastructure to connect all its hospitals in the country together. Fortis is on the lookout for specific IT solutions that would make it a filmless and paperless hospital.

HIS, a sophisticated IT system, stores and helps track patient records in an electronic form at Max Healthcare. Hospitals are sinking money into technology because they are convinced that it would be the key to success. Budramane says that the big hospitals have HIS systems and some are even going for an upgradation. PACS is also being implemented in some hospitals. Corporate hospitals have fueled the adoption of IT in Healthcare services in India. They treat their patients as customers and they have bigger motivation to serve their patients better."

Wockhardt Hospitals to develop and maintain a on-going relationship with doctors, patients, and corporates, the hospital required an easily manageable system that would catalog all the required details. Moreover, with the narrowing difference in service level at hotels and hospitals internationally, Wockhardt believes that such implementations are required to create an ambiance of efficiency. The implementation was also required to track feedback to generate a patient satisfaction index.

The solution
To meet these requirements, hospitals conceived, developed and implemented a CRM application to specifically meet the demands. The implementation generates feedback reports, occupancy reports, average length of stay, waiting and discharge reports. While all these reports were being filed even earlier, the solution has helped maintain and update all the reports on a daily basis, obviating any chance of delay. The accuracy rate of the reports has seen a new high as a result.

More importantly the CRM solution has automated relationship management. It has resulted in the creation of the Happy Hearts' Club, a group of people who have undergone similar heart surgeries at Wockhardt. At the forum, patients share their experience and sometimes also learn from each other.

The CRM solution also automatically forwards newsletters and relevant information to keep in touch with doctors and patients. "Hospitalization should not be seen as an episode but as a patient hospital relation, it is not a one time transaction. And the CRM solution has helped with just that,” said an official from Wockhardt.

Budramane says that such IT implementations are also going on at the state government level. Govt. of Andhra has automated district hospitals, area hospitals and primary health centers besides the Municipal Corporation of Delhi is going to see the next large scale HIS implementation while the Max group is working on implementing PACS.