Shuvankar Pramanick, Gr. CIO, Paras Healthcare

Today’s demand of technology in Healthcare Industry is rising very sharply. Healthcare Industry can be divided into various types in terms of business nature. Hospital Industry is one of them. Two or three decade before technology in hospital industry means Medical Equipment, standalone moderate billing system and a standard basic finance management system like Tally. Slowly the focus changed and we started thinking about integrated Hospital Information Systems which can handle different segments of the non-clinical process and also linked with different medical modalities. Till that time total thought process of adopting technology in hospital industry was bounded within business control and operational easiness.

But last 8-10 years Industry demand proposition is totally changed.  Hospital Industry is no longer thinking about the inside business control. Because there are several good ERP solutions which are master in core business control. Hospital Industry is adopting ERP instead of conventional Hospital Information System. Over and above they are placing good electronic Health record System which are specialised in gathering clinical data as well as very easily mapped with medical modalities.

Hospital Industry is started thing about Patient Side. They thought why not we reach to the people using technology and software. Industry analysed the patient’s requirement and their needs. So technologies and software are continuously developing to cover up all above demands.  In market we can found a numerous number of mobile apps, telemedicine facility, wearable tracking devices etc. But problem is “what is the exact and proper technology which can fill these needs for Hospital Industry”.

A significant change in the healthcare industry’s approach to providing care is underway—putting the patient at the centre of care. The goal is to improve patient satisfaction scores and engagement.But, this is new territory, and the industry as a whole is just starting to look into ways to engage with patients outside of a traditional office visit. For example, many providers haven’t yet tapped social media to build relationships with their customers. This will need to change, especially as patients begin to shop for healthcare the way they shop for cars or electrician services—by searching the Internet, looking for quality metrics and patient reviews, and comparing prices.

Still Hospital industry is looking for process improvement technology between patient and Hospital.

Referring to some article -

The best system for driving, measuring, and sustaining healthcare process improvement involves some critical dimensions:

Systematically integrating data and measurement—an analytics system. This system includes the technology and the expertise to gather data, make sense of it, and standardize measurements.

A health system’s success over the coming decade will depend on the ability and willingness to collaborate creatively with payers in order to get sustainably paid and deliver better care. The three systems approach gives hospitals the analytics, the content, and the deployment strategy to do this insightfully and sustainably.

So there is a technology requirement to gather data, analyse and convert patient’s need into business need. Basically it covers the definition of so called “Big data”.

Indian hospital industry has the lack of clinical data also. Hospital industry can be a major source for clinical information to other healthcare industry like pharmaceutical and medical equipment industry. No hospital in India analyse the disease trend, medication trend to improve technology in healthcare. It is a solo performance by pharmaceutical and medical industry.

 We are basically looking for the following major technology in coming 5 years.

Cloud based Electronic Health Record System, Big Data Analytics & Patient Access

There is a growing demand from consumers towards greater access to and portability of their health information. For example, Athena health was able to push Ebola-related patient travel history questions to its EHR Athena Clinical within an hour of the media frenzy over a Dallas hospital’s inability to treat Ebola patient Thomas Duncan. Duncan has since died as a result of the hospital sending him home first.

Traditional software implementations are just not capable of pushing seamless updates in near real-time like cloud-based EHRs can. Further, some cloud-based EHR providers also wrap ancillary business- and information-services around the software, enabling doctors to concentrate more on what they do best: practice medicine and improve the quality of life for patients.

Companies and start-ups in the healthcare analytics space will no doubt change the way healthcare is delivered and practiced. It’s an exciting time be in the industry and I look forward to seeing how these three technology trends continue to impact the goal of reducing costs and increasing quality.