Narayana Nethralaya Extends Enhanced Services To Patients

Narayana Nethralaya is a well-known eye hospital, based in Bangalore, India. A major chunk of the revenue for the hospital comes from corporate tie ups and the insurance sector.

With a growing list of patients, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the management to provide better and faster services. The billing process was very lengthy and the unstructured data was making the whole process more complicated. To address these issues, Narayana Nethralaya has deployed Healthcare Management Information System from Srishti Software, as well as Electronic Medical Records (EMR) facility.

Retrieving Patient History - A Major Hurdle

The medical records of patients accumulated over the years, was posing a major challenge to the medical staff. It was becoming difficult to manually retrieve patient information, as and when required. Informs Dr Rajesh Babu. B, Head, Medical Informatics and EMR, Narayana Nethralaya, “We anticipated increased costs of maintaining paper records in the coming few years. The data was unstructured and it was very difficult to analyse the data as and when required. The paper records were used by a person at a time. When a doctor left the organisation and a new doctor joined, it was very difficult to find the history of a particular patient.”

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There was also poor accountability among users regarding data quality at the hospital. There were long queues as the manual billing procedure was cumbersome and time consuming.

Srishti’s PARAS Scores over Others

When the hospital decided to go in for an electronic medical records facility, it evaluated solutions of vendors like Wipro. However, PARAS healthcare information management systems (HIMS) and EMR facility from Srishti Software was selected as it catered to the needs of all departments, doctors and patients of the hospital. The total cost of the deployment was around Rs 1.5 crore.

HIMS is an integrated administrative and clinical information data needed to manage the various activities of the hospital. It streamlines the work and process flow of the hospital, helps in maintenance of accurate medical records, supports doctors with information for providing critical care, generates and analyses data for planning, accounting and decision support.

The implementation consisted of 30 modules including automation of billing, registration, ward, pharmacy, stores, EMR, picture archival and communication system and telemedicine. All these have been integrated with the insurance and third party agents. The EMR has been deployed to get accurate data for enabling critical treatment decisions, better processing of insurance claims, automated drug allergy or interaction alerts, clinical notes, automated prescriptions and letters, quicker generation of case summaries, quicker ordering and access to lab reports.

Improved Quality of Clinical Care

The doctors can now retrieve and access a patient’s details at any point of time, as it is stored electronically. The time taken for consultation has been reduced drastically. In case of a patient revisiting the hospital, the data related to him or her can be retrieved from the system by using the unique hospital ID of the patient.

The implementation has also resulted in reduction of clinical care errors, follow up costs, cost of clinical records, and 24x7x365 availability of records, better resource allocation, faster and efficient OPD system.

Informs Babu, “Electronic medical records reduces costs required to maintain paper records, cost of employees managing and pulling out records, costs from liabilities arising out of lost case records and medical transcription costs.”