Tech Resuscitates Indian Healthcare

The Indian healthcare industry is undergoing a radical transformation, with adoption of better hospital Information Systems and Healthcare IT solutions, both in the private and public sector. Primary strategic intent is to leverage technology to increase patient reach, standardize / innovate care delivery, improve operational efficiency and enhance patient experience

What is causing healthcare organizations beginning to demand more technology innovations? Rising healthcare costs, pressure to improve the quality of treatments, patient safety, the availability and collaboration of information, and complying with the large number of regulations instituted by the government are the key challenges which are prompting advancement of technology to overcome them.
In the Indian context, IT adoption is playing a major role in the overall digitization of the patient workflow to replace the paper-based manual workflow by incorporating HIS/PACS/RIS and advanced visualization solutions. Being a price sensitive market, hospitals always look for cost-effective solutions to improve their workflow efficiency. However, we are observing that in the last couple of years, customers have invested more in advance visualization Imaging IT solutions than just simple RIS/PACS.

ADVANCED VISUALIZATION
In Healthcare Imaging IT currently, global trends are adopting a client-server based advance multi-modality pre-processing, apart from archiving, distributing images and creating reports using radiology information system/ Picture Archiving and Communications System ( RIS/PACS). This trend is being seen in India as well, as major institutes have adopted advance visualisation 3D pre-processing for faster and more accurate diagnosis for the increasing number of examinations done per day. "Siemens has a client server 3D advanced visualization and pre-processing solution called syngo.via platform. The syngo.via platform helps clinicians in providing faster and accurate diagnosis. In a nutshell, the availability of patient data at point of care, across the hospital and even outside, is now achieved by adopting Healthcare Imaging IT Solutions," says Vivekkumar Verma, Business Head, RIS/PACS and Advanced Visualisation, Siemens Healthcare, India. Siemen's client base for Imaging IT, syngo.via advance visualisation is far and wide and spreads from India based Medanta, Germany's University of Munich Medical Center, US based Sand Lake Imaging, Orlando and Hong Kong based St. Teresa's Hospital at Kowloon .

"Siemens is making syngo.via more anatomically intelligent to support radiologists and medical technology personnel in their routine workflows. The software "understands" human anatomy and prepares the images for diagnostic reading. Currently there is an increasing adoption of Imaging IT mobile Applications, which empower physicians and surgeons to have secured access to patients' data and image processing using mobile applications like syngo,via mobile application," adds Verma.

AGGREGATION OF INFORMATION
While shedding light on the scopes of improvement in this vertical, Jayashree Thacker, GIC Industry Leader - Healthcare, IBM Global Business Services, IBM India believes that while information technology is laying a good foundation and creating individual pools of excellence, true value with respect to improved clinical outcomes would come when patient information from multiple sources--hospitals, diagnostic laboratories, physician offices, home care and systems is aggregated to create a unified patient view that will enable delivery of personalized, collaborative, evidence-based care.

 

"Big Data insights can dramatically transform the Healthcare Industry; but currently, information technology solutions availability is overruled by our care delivery ecosystem readiness (structural, policy, mindset) to achieve this state - and that's what we need to change as a country," adds Thacker.
IBM's Digital Hospital framework, Care Co-ordination solutions, Mobile solutions, Analytics solutions, Fraud Management solutions, to name a few, facilitate Healthcare Providers and Payers transform their value chains and optimize business outcomes. IBM's Watson is an industry game changer for clinical decision making through its ability to peruse and interpret millions of text pages of clinical research documentation, medical evidence, individual patient records likehistories, physicians' notes, laboratory results, map patterns for predictive analytics and then arrive at potential treatment options and their confidence rating along with constant improvisation as new evidence and treatment guidelines comes through.

HOSPITAL MANAGEMENT

Healthcare in one industry vertical where there is little or no room for error. Secondly, many individuals are not keen or comfortable on sharing their information about health conditions which means that in this industry, privacy plays a crucial role. Thirdly, to get to the root of as problems, experts have to undergo diagnosis in more than one ways to confirm the truth. TCS Hospital Management System(HMS) have one version of HMS which is specifically meant for public sector/government hospitals, and another, which caters to the very discerning private hospitals since the complexity of operations and the method of executing patient diagnosis operated differently in government and private hospitals in India. Medical Trust Hospital in Cochin, Tata Memorial Hospital in Kolkata and Sankara Nethralaya in Chennai are some of the better-known hospitals where our 

HMS are few names who have successfully adopted HMS solutions. Apart rom HMS, TCS also has health solutions for telemedicine, EMR and disease management, Advanced analytics and provider performance insight dashboards,Revenue cycle management, IT outsourcing and knowledge process outsourcing.

A NEW ERA IN HEALTHCARE
There is no doubt that IT is giving boost to healthcare industry making the whole vertical becoming more cost efficient and improving on treatment parameters. Doctors will be able to collaborate with other physicians and experts in new ways and use computers to analyze patient and medical data, allowing them to provide better and more efficient treatment for their patients. In this way, we can say that a renaissance has emerged in the age old industry of patient care.