• Investment World
• eWorld
• Brand Line
• Mentor
• Life
• Canvas
• Praxis
• Urban Pulse
• Brand Quest
• The New Manager

Stocks

• Quotes
• SE Diary
• Scoreboard
• Open-End Mutual Fund

Cross Currency

• Rates
  
  

Shipping

• Ports
  
  

Archives

• Yesterday
• Datewise
• Resources
• In Focus
• In Depth

Group Sites

• The Hindu
• The Hindu ePaper
• Business Line
• Business Line ePaper
• Sportstar
• Frontline
• The Hindu eBooks
• The Hindu Images

L.N. Revathy

... technology flashes your x-ray on the surgeon's screen, ensuring start of treatment with minimum loss of time.

Any injury is painful, more so, if one suffers a broken bone. An even more painful prospect is the long wait at the doc's.

The process starts after the registration formalities, with the doctor asking the patient to narrate the circumstance of, say, the fall. The patient is then advised to come back with an x-ray of the injured part to enable the doctor to begin the treatment.

Now, imagine a situation where patients are not asked to wait for the diagnostic investigation report, but can just go back to the consulting doctor/surgeon after the x-ray is taken.

But how can the waiting time for retrieval of the film be cut? Enter, the Picture Archiving Communication System (PACS). This captures the image in electronic format and makes it available on the screen of the doctor's system even as the patient re-enters the consulting room or ward.

All this is happening not in the realm of imagination but at the GKNM (G. Kuppuswamy Naidu Memorial) Hospital in Coimbatore.

The hospital has this facility, whereby the images and the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) are available anywhere, anytime (on any system) at the hospital, should the consultant want to take a look at a patient's case history.

According to Biju Velayudhan, Manager (IT), the hospital has taken the lead in implementing such a system in India.

Claiming the facility to be the largest of its kind in Asia, Biju says that all diagnostic investigations - be it text reports such as lab test report or notes written by doctors or picture information such as x-rays, scans, angiogram, laproscopic surgery, endoscopy etc, — are converted into electronic format and stored in a large server.

"We had automated the Hospital Information System almost two decades ago. But it had no graphical user interface. In August 2005, we went in for a client server architecture and Oracle Database and brought the entire medical data into the system."

The 20-odd medical equipment and over 60 systems at the hospital are connected to the PACS and the EMR. Investigations done on different occasions are automatically organised by date in the same electronic patient file.

As the complete medical file is available within seconds, doctors don't have to wait till the conventional paper file is presented to them. Then again, the clarity of, say, the scan or an angio on the screen makes it easier for the doctor to compare the last investigation with that of the present one.

For the patient, the waiting time is minimised. One can just walk into the consulting room or ward to understand the implication of the disease/complication better (for instance, instead of visualising a block in the artery see the picture on the screen).

Does it mean that the patient who walks into GKNM hospital has no option to take a second opinion or is compelled to spend again to take a scan and consult another specialist elsewhere?

"We give the complete medical file to the patient in a CD. This can be viewed and analysed by any other doctor. The patient can also take multiple copies, if need be, for reference by a specialist in some other city or country," says Biju. He stresses that the medical record is the property of the patient and the hospital is only a guardian to it.

The hospital has procured and installed the PACS/EMR system from VEPRO AG, Germany.

According to Biju, PACS/EMR is the latest innovation of IT implementation revolutionising healthcare in the US and in Europe.

The capacity of the image storage network area box is 3 TB/annum. Is this capacity large enough? "Yes, we do about 8 GB/day."

How comfortable are the specialists about using this technology?

"It took us about 20 to 30 minutes to take a look at the medical records and investigation reports earlier. Now, at the click of a button, they are available on the screen and we can also enlarge the image size (even in parts) should there be a need/doubt," says a specialist.

lnr@thehindu.co.in

More Stories on : Software | Health | Medical Institutions & Hospitals

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Value for your money

Copyright © 2007, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line