How Tech Changed Healthcare

Indian healthcare has woken up: it knows it can't do without IT. Get an inside scoop of the amazing things it's doing with IT

Saturday, July 05, 2008

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Gone are the days of those hand-scrawled notes, scribbled prescriptions, big diagnostic charts, patient queues, and lost patient charts. Today, all this info and critical details are no more than a keyboard click away. IT is fast bringing an apace makeover of the healthcare industry and changing the face of traditional doctor--patient relationship.

Healthcare, being an information intensive sector, is one of the key areas that is benefiting from the use of information technology. The big Indian hospitals have now realized that with IT they can not only automate their medical processes, but also cut costs and increase the ROI. Technology has become a constitutional part of healthcare and is addressing to many issues that have been of concern for the industry for many decades. Picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), Healthcare information systems (HIS), and telemedicine are a few of the many IT applications in healthcare. IT has bestowed enormous benefits such as creating a one-stop data warehouse for all clinical activities, faster patient throughput and diagnosis, reduced manpower requirement, and cases being referred overseas.

We talk all this and more with the help of 2 disparate case studies-one of an ashram and other of a corporate hospital, where IT is working to the benefit of both doctors and patients alike. Here's a peek into how Swami Ramdev's Patanjali Yogpeeth treats 2 million patients a year, and a promising start-up hospital -Artemis (paperless and filmless hospital).

Faith, Health, and IT

Dawn with yoga' seems to be a household punch line these days. All thanks to Swami Ramdev's yog sessions on Aastha channel every morning.

With the mission of extending the basic mantra of yog to each and every person was established Ramdev's Patanjali Yogpeeth, an ashram situated on the holy banks of Ganga, in Haridwar. Patanjali Yogpeeth heals its patients through yog and ayurved. Set up on about thirty five acres of land area, the ashram has a large OPD that can house around 6000 to 10,000 patients, an IPD of 500 beds, dental clinic vested with latest dental equipments which is the first of its type to adopt yogic and ayurvedic methodology for treatment, team of 200 doctors, and attending to over 2500 patients daily, giving nerves to even some of the best corporate hospitals.

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IT-a constitutional part of Patanjali

Challenges
Attending to over 2500 patients a day was not a facile task for the Yogpeeth. Complexity of running the hospital, increasing no. of patients, keeping patient and treatment records were posing a challenge to the hospital. The line-ups were so long that many patients had to return untreated. On top of this with service centers and yog teachers of Patanjali spread in every nook and corner of the country, it was difficult to file and track their details related to work and area under contribution.

Scientists at Dept. of Yog R&D	Sunil Singh, IT Head

Solutions
Patanjali took the help of IT to offer better services to the patients. With Hospial Management System (HMS) and Human Resource Management System (HRMS) in place, data is now collated at a single place. “Follow-up of patients is easy as they just need to quote their ID and all details of patient treatment and history would be available online. The process has made things work fast and ensured that no patient is sent untreated. Also, we are able to track the details of our yog teachers spread across the country,” informs Sunil Singh, IT head of Patanjali.

The entire IT infrastructure of Patanjali is based on fibre optic cables that connect all 7 blocks, providing 2 Mbps data transfer speed. Also, they have placed access points at strategic locations within the main institute and their 6 sites located nearby. They have 4 IBM Servers (with Win 2003 server ), 2 backup servers, router from Cisco 3800 series, Firewall (SonicWall).

IT in Yoga
Scientists at the ashram are working to study the effects of yoga on body. To monitor the effects on body, the doctors have some interesting tools in place. For instance, polygraphs, the lie detectors used mainly for interrogating people involved in crime, serves very useful tool in the hands of doctors.

“There is a 16 channel polygraph which can simultaneously record 16 variables such as the heart rate, heart rate variability, cardiac output, the blood pressure non-invasively, muscle strength, blink rate (especially interesting as computer vision syndrome often results from a low blink rate), a metabolic analyzer which evaluates oxygen consumed and lung functions, various equipments for skill testing and evaluating performance. We also assess the nerve conduction velocity and muscle tension,” speaks Dr. Shirley Telles, Chief Research Consultant, Dept. of Yog R&D.

“We use computerized Windows-based programs for the tests to measure the amount of oxygen consumed and carbon dioxide eliminated (particularly important as the emphasis is on breathing practices-pranayama). A high-end telemetric (wireless) physiological and neurological monitoring system in the new campus (yoga village), which houses 500 cottages, is in the pipeline,” informs Dr. Naveen KV, Research Consultant, Dept. of Yog R&D.

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