44 India's Best IT Implementations of the year 2005

Continued from page: 3

Friday, June 03, 2005

Most Innovative Plasma Display Wockhardt Hospital & Heart Institute

Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

Project Head: Herbert Albert, IT Incharge , Vishal Bali, VP Operations 
Location: Bangalore

There are projects that cost a lot of money and effort and still end up going nowhere, and there are projects that cost, what seem like peanuts but still end up making a huge impact. The patient status display system at Wockhardt Hospital & Heart Institute, Bangalore falls in the latter category. The project is simple in concept and implementation, and while it could have been done by any other hospital, has not been attempted by any one else. 

To understand the full impact of the system, you need to put yourselves in the shoes of relatives of patients undergoing surgery, or recuperating after the surgery in the ICU. Their anxiety is only understandable. Typically, they would be groping for the smallest bit of information. The system takes patient information from the hospital information system, and keyed in put from medical staff during the operation or when the patient is in the ICU, and displays it on a plasma TV kept in the visitors area. The displayed information can be from a menu of predefined items or keyed in. the system can also run timed PowerPoint shows (.pps files) or flash animations. 

Vishal Bali, VP Operations (Top) Herbert Albert, IT Incharge

Each patient's status is displayed for a minute. In case of emergency, there is a freeze button, which can override the cycling display and emergency information like, paging a relative to meet a doctor or to provide blood at the blood bank can be flashed. The system has a simple operating interface, where attending nurses call up all information from menus. Only one line of additional information, which is usually about when relatives can meet patients, is typed in. The menu items on patient status range all the way from 'operation in progress', through various recovery stages. The messages of the system are meant to pacify the relatives. There is one item 'patient is critical', which is flashed when necessary, only with the attending doctor's permission. The application front end, the data entry screen is a Visual Basic application running on Windows PCs. The back end is a MySQL database running on Linux. The concept was developed by Vishal Bali and Herbert Albert, with implementation done by Think Ahead Advisory services. Also involved was the ten member team from the operation theatre and the ICU. The project got the go ahead in Jan 2003, was piloted in Jan 2004 and implementation was completed by May 2004 at a cost of Rs 8 lakhs. 

Our Jury was of the unanimous opinion that this was one of the most apt usages of IT that they had come across, delivering on a high priority need, albeit of a limited audience, with a very simple solution. Hats off to the solution for its simplicity.

Next Page : Most Technologically Challenging PRISM National Stock Exchange of India

Page(s)   1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11