Healthcare Industry Scales Up IT Investment

India is the fastest growing health care IT market in Asia with an expected growth rate of 22%, says a recent report by Springboard Research. Hospitals across the country are leveraging the power of IT to provide the best of healthcare services.

Wockhardt Hospitals, a part of the $300 million Wockhardt Group has always spearheaded innovative IT solutions to enhance the patient care delivery. Vishal Bali, CEO, Wockhardt Hospitals spoke to Biztech2 on the transcending role of IT in the healthcare sector.

Can you give us a brief overview of the healthcare scenario in India?

Indian healthcare industry has gone though a significant transformation in the past decade. Increased participation of private players (60% of health expenditure in private sector) has dramatically improved hospitals’ infrastructure and patient services. Unlike earlier, when patients had to travel abroad to avail of high-end healthcare services, we now have patients coming to India for super-speciality healthcare. Wockhardt is now creating very high-end hospitals even in remote regions, where super-speciality healthcare was never thought of.

How can IT help in increasing the efficiency of health care sector in India?

IT has been predominantly used by most hospitals in India as part of their administrative processes. However, the role of IT is now transcending. Medical technology, which plays a critical role in diagnosis and treatment of diseases can not be imagined without IT support. IT will advance with the growth in medical technology. Today at the back end of every hospital, there is a web of information including both clinical and non-clinical, which is very essential for good care delivery to patients. We need to bridge the urban-rural divide in healthcare and technologies like telemedicine can help achieve that.

When compared to other developed countries, IT is not as widely used by the healthcare sector in India. What in your opinion, are the major reasons for this?

The reason behind this is that healthcare in India is not professionally driven. Since there were hardly any professionally managed structures, new avenues and new methodologies did not have much scope. A large part of IT initiatives has to come from the vision and the focus of the management. Every large healthcare group is now significantly increasing their IT budget and is trying to create an information system which is not just administrative in nature but equally directive on the clinical side. Our annual spend on IT is more than Rs 10 crore and this is also due to our ongoing expansion of hospitals.

Could you enumerate the key challenges while implementing an IT solution in the healthcare sector?

I think the biggest challenge is that clinicians still do not adapt themselves to an IT enabled environment in a big way. The current generation of clinicians are more IT savvy but the older generation is still a little hesitant while embracing new IT initiatives. Another significant challenge is that technologies are changing very rapidly. It takes a lot of effort to keep pace with these technologies and create an organisation which can constantly invest in these technologies.

What are the kind of IT initiatives undertaken by the Wockhardt group to improvise its services?

We have created a high-end Hospital Information System (HIS) that has been standardised across all our hospitals. It takes care of the administrative and clinical processes inside the hospitals. We have also incorporated PACS (Picture archiving and communication system) at all our hospitals, which helps in routing of several kind of images like MRI scans, CT scans, CATE lab images, and ultrasound images. Wockhardt was the first hospital group to employ the concept of ‘Virtual Family Visit’, which allowed the relatives of patients to check a patient’s condition right after a major surgery, through a recorded message on the hospital’s website. Apart from this, we have online billing systems and 24/7 contact centre for our international clients.

We have used IT in every core discipline of the hospital. All our hospitals are well connected though efficient networks. Data storage and data mining is also very important for institutions like hospital. We have high-end and back up servers to ensure that only critical information is available on the main server, which also ensures least redundancy and breakdown times.

What things do you keep in mind while making any new investment in IT?

IT is a long term investment; one can not count on it in terms of immediate ROI. There is need to look at IT from a long term investment perspective; however at the same time one has to be very logical to ensure that the IT spend is right. While making a new IT investment, we concentrate on productivity improvement and ensure that it will help our staff to perform their core function of creating better patient care.

What role does a CIO play at Wockhardt group; is he a part of the management decision making process?

Our CIO definitely plays a very important role in the management of the organisation. I believe that CIOs and CEOs needs to work together with a common vision; they can not work with parallel vision. They need to work in collaboration with the rest of the organisation. Many a time, need for new areas comes from employees who are the core process owners. They are the ones who are at the point of delivery of care. CIOs must interact with these people on a constant basis and should understand their concerns and issues. I think CIOs should look at things more from a process perspective rather than technology. CIOs needs to understand the overall vision of the organisation in order to create processes and IT investment which are not redundant technologies.

What are your future plans as far as IT initiatives are concerned?

Our first priority is to ensure seamless flow of information across all our institutions. We want to create such an environment for our patients where they will be able to avail the information at all our Wockhardt hospitals whenever they visit.