Paperless hospitals will soon become the order of the decade. ?Computer on wheels? (Cows) is evolving as the next-generation technique for the conventional healthcare sector. Hospitals are slowly accepting the cloud concept, primarily for three reasons ? patient safety, cost effectiveness and better return on investment (RoI). Bigger hospitals ? such as Apollo, Fortis, Narayana Hrudalaya ? are expanding to tier-II and tier-III cities by setting up no-frills hospitals. In this scenario, the best bet for improving the doctor-patient understanding is through electronic health records (EHRs) and electronic medical records (EMRs) on cloud technology.
IT companies are trying to customise solutions on software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to support all the major features required by a hospital and its modular architecture. Hospital leaders say that this is a new concept that is yet to catch many big players? fancy as there are apprehensions that a lot of private information is becoming public cloud. For instance, SevenHills eHealth, a part of 25-year-old SevenHills Healthcare Group from Vizag having two multi-speciality hospitals in Vizag and Mumbai, is perhaps the first hospital in the country to go paperless in the country. ?By digitising data, human errors can be avoided to a large extent, besides making patient data accessible to the required doctors and nursing staff anywhere and anytime for better and immediate patient care. Our e-health suite prevents errors due to handwriting or miscommunication by the medical staff,” says Suresh Kumar, CIO, SevenHills eHealth.
?Every patient is allocated a unique health identification card (UHID) at the time of registration. This UHID provides the complete details of the patient’s medical history as recorded in SevenHills e-healthcare suite at any point of time and also during their subsequent visits,? he adds. Doctors, on accessing the patient data from their smart handheld device, can monitor the patient?s progress, change medication and care by mentioning the details under the patient care section, which is made available real time to the nursing staff who can, then, follow the doctor?s instructions.
Despite its potential, cloud penetration or the adoption rates in the healthcare sector is less than 5%. ?The conventional mindset of the medical fraternity has to change to follow innovative solutions and its applications for prompt patient care and faster recovery,? Suresh Kumar adds. Similarly, Exleaz Consulting, the official partner of Salesforce.com and solution partner of Amazon Web Services, and a customer relationship management applications specialist, recently launched its web-based hospital management system, MediEaz. It is claimed to be the first cloud-based HMS in India and helps businesses save up to 95% of carbon emitted by on-premise servers. It is the first cloud-based, SaaS to support all major features required by a hospital, and its modular architecture allows a high level of scalability and flexibility.
Says Sambamurthy Margam, MD, Exleaz Consulting: ?The growing Indian healthcare industry needs innovative solutions to address numerous challenges and needs. MediEaz helps keep costs under control by eliminating duplicate tests and other redundancies, streamlining the billing process, and maximizing bed utilisation.” It provides a full range of clinical, administrative and lab capabilities, unified by a single data repository, which means patient information can be shared securely and seamlessly across all major departments and care settings.
Analysts say that despite widespread adoption of cloud-based solutions by most industries, the healthcare industry has been slow to embrace cloud computing. There are some challenges such as regulations which are still unclear, and confidentiality issues with respect to data security. Says Sandeep Sinha, director, Healthcare Practice, South Asia and Middle East, Frost & Sullivan: ?The concept of paperless hospital is spreading across various departments of a hospital such as finance, pharmacy, etc. Many corporate hospitals are aggressively working on leveraging the SaaS model in a paperless environment and are investing heavily. However, EMRs across many hospitals are not owned by one corporate group on a SaaS model. Hence, hospitals are not open to sharing their information on a public domain. The technology is available, but the hospitals need to trust and work in this direction. This model has an increased efficiency on access of medical info across the healthcare settings and geography.?
The primary concerns are about safeguarding confidential patient information and compliance with key regulations. However, if these obstacles are overcome, cloud computing solutions can bring tremendous benefits to healthcare organisations. It can help them share information stored across disparate information systems on a real-time basis.
A Zinnov report says that hospitals in India are leveraging IT across their key functional areas. It is estimated that Indian hospitals spend close to $191 million on IT. It is expected that this spending shall grow at a CAGR 25% over the period 2010-2020 and cloud computing can potentially address close to 40% of the total IT spend by India healthcare industry.
A national survey by the US-based Mayo Clinic says that most medical residents spend as many as six hours a day documenting and only a tiny portion seeing actual patients. A large-scale Johns Hopkins study of more than 40 hospitals and 160,000 patients shows that when health information technologies replace paper forms and handwritten notes, both hospitals and patients benefit strongly.