The Hindu Business Line : IT – in sickness and in health

If you had Rs 15 lakh, would you spend it on ultrasound equipment or on implementing information technology in your hospital? This is the nature of the dilemma doctors and healthcare providers face in India.

IT companies ought to conduct awareness programmes to help hospitals understand how technology can ‘transform’ their work. But few software vendors are doing this, say healthcare players, an impression strengthened by the poor turnout at Frost and Sullivan’s two-day conference on ‘IT Advancements in Healthcare Delivery.’

Barring sponsors Microsoft and HP, no other IT major with a healthcare practice was present.

Some hospitals have taken the plunge. With a team of coders and software developers, they are creating solutions to improve their core competency — diagnosis, treatment, prescription and information communication. Here’s what some healthcare providers shared at the conference.

Tablet PC

Fortis Healthcare is pilot-testing the use of tablet PCs. With these, a substitute for paper-based notepads, doctors can key in real-time information, which is stored in a central repository. Nurses can make updates via the tablet PC and doctors alerted through SMS if any complications arise during treatment. The hospital plans to barcode patients. Manish Gupta, Chief Information Officer , said the barcode would ensure that every patient had a unique identity and give access to his entire medical history and treatment.

The armed forces

The Indian Army too is working on bar-coding soldiers. The armed forces caters to about 3.5 crore people (soldiers and their dependents) and has about 350 medical hospitals across India. Lt. Col. Ashvini Goel, Jt. Director - MS (IT), Director General Medical Services - Army, said barcoding drugs was also being considered. “If we can put information such as batch number, lot number, date of expiry and drug strength, we can match this with the soldier’s barcode and improve his treatment,” he said.

Dr Ashok Kumar, Deputy Director General & Director, Central Bureau of Health Intelligence, spoke of an ongoing integrated disease control project in partnership with the World Bank. It involves identifying about 20 epidemic-related symptoms and communicating the same from the district level upwards to the national level.

“If grassroots workers are provided with hand-held devices, they can enter this data real time and it can be communicated directly to the central data repository. This can prevent epidemics and overcrowding in hospitals,” he said.

E-money, other initiatives

U.K. Ananthapadmanabhan, Senior Vice-President, Kovai Medical Centre and Hospital, has implemented a pneumatics-based system to transport drugs to various parts of his hospital. Inspired by similar set-ups at CMC Vellore and a pharmacy in Germany, he set up a central drug packaging and collecting zone at his hospital. One can package drugs into containers and dump them into pneumatics- powered pipelines that will deliver them to the required destination.

Other initiatives include e-procurement of drugs from the pharmacy, touch screen patient registration and an e-money concept where patients/their relatives may deposit Rs 500 or more towards foreseen expenses. They are given a bar-coded receipt that is valid across the canteen, various labs and pharmacy. All bills are automatically debited against the e-money amount deposited by the patient. The key is to be innovative and tell software developers what you want rather than zeroing in on an existing product, says Ananthapadmanabhan. “Don’t tell vendors you need PACS (pictures, archives and communication systems). Tell them what you want to achieve and you could get some thing more powerful than PACS,” he says.

Consulting firm Frost and Sullivan’s recent report says hospitals are also going in for other high-end technologies such as smart cards (for electronic patient record), RFID (for tracking movable assets and inventory control) and biometrics (for attendance management and access control) to improve processes. The report, which surveyed 30 tier I and 60 tier II hospitals across India, indicates that hospitals are investing 1- 5 per cent of their revenues (from a few lakhs to a few crore rupees) in such IT developments each year.

‘Insight is key’

“Hospitals must be run by doctors, not administrators,” said Dr P.V.A. Mohandas of MIOT hospitals. He cited an instance where a vendor claimed his software would allow X-Rays to be accessed by everyone in the hospital. “What purpose does that serve? Why should an administration chap have access to patient X-Rays?,” he asked. In another instance a software vendor e-mailed a dermatologist asking for reasons for the drop in the number of MRI and CT scans conducted by him that month.

Dr J.S. Rajkumar, Chairman, Lifeline Clinics and Multi Speciality Hospitals, said vendors could build business intelligence in their software so that doctors could pre-empt treatment and put less pressure on already scarce medical resources.

Vijayarajan. A., Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer, Manipal Hospital, suggested vendors offer software on-demand (plug and play model) to hospitals.

The healthcare IT market in India is estimated at about Rs 450 crore (inclusive of hardware and software) and is growing at about 18 per cent CAGR. However, about 80 per cent of the market is skewed towards administrative software with the the rest focusing on clinical applications.

archana@thehindu.co.in

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