Nice to hear/read about the hospitals looking to use technology. This is one of the industries that serves the mankind directly, i always felt that technology can be used to enhance quality of service in the hospitals, be it a small one or a huge hospital.
But at the end of the day we need to see how effective it may turn out to be for the 700 million population in India(~70%) who are rather not so economically strong to get the benefits of these resources.
One good thing is that we are atleast trying to reach there soon.
FANCY a paperless hospital? It may not relieve pain, but carrying a smart card embedded with personal details and a doctor’s notes could reduce the amount of paper that patients carry to the hospital. That vision is yet to materialise. Bandwidth availability and faster IT adoption could make it a reality in the not-sodistant future in at least a few hospitals in India.
On the road to that promising future, India has suddenly seen a spurt in quality healthcare over the past few years, with world-class hospitals like Wockhardt Hospitals, Asian Heart Institute, Apollo Hospitals and Fortis Hospitals, coming up. In these hospitals, as with most new service offerings, it is the information technology backbone that is at work behind the scenes, ensuring that the quality of services and treatment is of the highest order.
Says Vishal Bali, CEO, Wockhardt Hospitals: “Today, digital information is at the core of healthcare delivery in India and diagnosis is becoming more and more information-led.”
What would healthcare and IT have in common? A lot, it would seem. The CT scans, MRIs, 3D and other images are now exclusively the domain of high-tech healthcare machines. The use of semiconductors in healthcare devices (like digital monitors, MRI, CT scan machines and so on) is at $2 billion a year and this is increasing at 17-20% a year. Companies like GE, Philips, Siemens work closely with chip-makers like Texas Instruments and others to embed medical devices with semiconductors.Various vital signs monitors hook up directly to the central hospital servers, allowing doctors to monitor patients remotely. Finally, massive state-of-the-art servers, like the HP-Compaq ML 350, which can store up to 1.2 terabyte of data, are used to house all possible images and information about the patients.
Broadly, IT is used in hospitals in three different ways — in providing hospital information systems (HIS) which looks after hospital administrative functions as well as patient records; in enhancing the delivery of treatment and post-treatment monitoring, and finally in better overall service offering to patients.
Adds Anshuman Khare, IT-Manager, Asian Heart Institute, “We have to create a system with proper backup clusters so that no data is lost.” So what is the exact process that takes place once a patient is admitted to a hospital? On admission, the details of the patient are immediately put on to the network. The paperwork is minimal, and restricted to the doctor’s assessment of medical record and treatment. Every ward has a secretary that would feed these details onto the patient’s record, and subsequently, every single input provided to the patient, whether it’s an X-ray, a path lab report or a MRI scan, is logged in. Thus, various departments of the hospitals are also integrated with the HIS. Additionally, all reports are available to doctors on hospital networks, who needn’t be physically present at the patient’s bedside. Philips and GE have helped greatly in remote monitoring — they’ve designed machines that monitor vital signs and feed them directly into the servers, which allow doctors to check on their patient from several different locations.
It’s here that data security also comes into place, because hospitals don’t allow all doctors to view patient files. Remote monitoring, according to hospital executives, will become a more prominent feature in hospitals which focus on intensive care of patients.
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