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IT pills to keep hospitals healthy

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CIOL Bureau
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Ajay Shankar Sharma

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Hospital Management software is nothing new and neither is corporate emergence into this field, forming hospital chains. People have read aplenty about these. But what have people read about these? If there is enough meaningful number of hospitals already automated with the so-called hospital management suites, then how come research is still coming to India from the west?

You'd be surprised to know that it takes only 25 samples for a new drug to be tested before it can be brought to shelf and marketed. However, to carry out a research on a subject, by even the research institutes, isn't simple. Firstly, all the data lies piled up in paper form in most of the hospitals and in the other few, it lies in digital "unconnected" form. Yes, these are the hospitals that boast of having automated the entire patient history, medical records, diagnosis, treatment history, allergies, drug administered etc. but have it more in free flowing data form, rather than organized in the manner that can be used intelligently by another software application.

To understand it better, imagine yourself searching for "Lung cancer patient administered XYZ drug in the month of March" on Google. Yes, you'll see a lot of results matching the searched keywords but would you call such software "Hospital Automation" software that enables research? Absolutely no. Just having data in digital form is no good. Data of one department/speciality of hospital needs to be interlinked with all the others, not only within one hospital, but also across the chain or mutually agreeable hospitals. Today's HIMS (Hospital Information Management System) solution providers need to understand that HIMS application needs to understand the industry requirements, the way the data is intended to be used and need to carry the vision to envisage the direction hospital industry is headed.

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Critical issue

World-wide, the most crucial resource for a hospital is a bed, primarily because of the cost associated with the cost of paraphernalia that needs to be provided along with the bed (the monitors, the basic equipment etc), the cost of medical attendants, special staff, nurses, doctors etc. (since the number of beds defines the staff and services that would be needed) and of course the real estate. In India, when you walk into an ord hospital, you'd find patients scattered all over the corridors, because in India, its not customary to return patients due to lack of beds and probably the lack of legal governance around medical services. Once that tightens, even India would be prone to appointments given by doctors for operations, due to lack of beds.

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When a student of a school posed a question to president Dr.Kalam, as to what is India's biggest enemy, another student had replied and he couldn't agree less with her, that India's biggest enemy is "Poverty". We don't have the luxury of free flowing funds. Hence, applying this statement in context of India, the solution of having "more" number of beds is ruled out, since in a typical speciality hospital, provisioning a bed in an ICU would cost upwards of Rs.1 Crore. Hence, the next best solution is to use the beds efficiently.

Leveraging IT

This can be best described with an example. I go to a cardiology institute for a coronary treatment. I occupy the bed for typically a week before I can walk out of the hospital. The time consuming stages are: Doctor's availability, consultation, diagnosis, second opinion, actual surgical procedure, and post-operative care. Out of these, with the advent of Hospital automation, the kind we're talking about, a patient would walk in, his electronic medical record created, symptoms noted - now the symptoms are shared with other doctors electronically, all of them (say on the panel) give their opinion, issue diagnosed, since a panel has looked at it, the second opinion may not be further required, date for the operation fixed and done with. The doc simply suggests the post-operative care that needs to be taken. Post-operative care usually involves cutting of sutures (stitches) or medication or general health check to make sure everything is all right. This causes repeat visits and for outside patients, it turns into another hassle. Now, once the patient has his electronic medical record, the doctor in his city of residence can take a look at it, and render the post-operative care (as per what has been suggested by the doc at the institute) and refer him back to the institute only when the need arises. This is when telemedicine will be used in real sense. Telemedicine is today perceived as two doctors exchanging x-ray images over email and coming to a conclusion. This is incorrect. Telemedicine entails connection of software to medical equipment. It entails a doctor being able to listen to a patient's heartbeat a few kilometres away.

With more than 60 - 70% of India's population residing in rural villages and 90% of the specialists and super specialists, residing in urban areas, telemedicine can revolutionize the way we treat the patients in remote areas.

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Deployment of IT solutions in health care has already made an impact. The advantages of enabling IT in hospitals can be enumerated as below:

1. The quality of service has gone up and hospitals have enhanced their efficiency in terms of reach and delivery of service.

2. Integrated electronic medical records facilitate research, as data is made available in structured manner, which helps in studying trends, identifying disease outbreaks etc.

3. By means of creation of electronic patient record, each patient's blood group, known allergies etc. would be documented and available, hence, preventing manual errors.

4. It also facilitates remote diagnosis of patients. As a result people in rural areas can also have access to consultation from speciality doctors.

5. It has enabled Customer Relationship Management (CRM), as this is a very important facet for Speciality hospitals and chain hospitals, in terms of patient loyalty.

6. IT also helps patients move seamlessly across different geographical locations.

7. IT provides the flexibility to procuring and billing.

8. IT also provides accounting framework hence help with entire billing, inventory management, store management, laboratory management, etc.

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Thus IT helps in maximising returns on every penny spent.

  The author is Co- founder & CEO, Srishti Software

Srishti Software is a global software engineering and business solutions firm providing products and services in the areas of Knowledge Management (KM), Healthcare Information Management System (HIMS) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), both globally as well as in the domestic market.

CIOL Bureau