A shot of hospital information systems

Our HIS encompasses most of the functions and work flows of a hospital such as billing, aterial, administrative, clinical back office and MIS integrated as one system

Suresh Shenoy
VP, IT
Wockhardt Hospitals

It may be a while before you get a prescription to correct your heartbeat via your mobile phone, but Indian hospitals are initiating steps on this journey by implementing hospital information systems (HIS). HIS are evolving from order entry systems, administrative systems and departmental subsystems to one solution which is the hospital’s ERP.

Hospitals in India are in various stages of implementing HIS. “We are a multi-location hospital and nearly 70 to 80 percent of the hospital’s activities are covered by the HIS. It is difficult to say that we have arrived with an implementation such as this,” says Sunil Kapoor, corporate IT head, Fortis Hospitals. Some of the modules that are present in HIS are registration, emergency, OPD, wards, laboratory, billing, help desk, purchase and pharmacy. “Our HIS encompasses most of the functions and work flows of a hospital such as billing, material, administrative, clinical back office and MIS integrated as one system,” says Suresh Shenoy, VP, IT, Wockhardt Hospitals. The trend is catching on rapidly, and most hospitals have already started this process in the last decade.

Long-term benefits

Hospitals are of the opinion that deploying HIS will not make healthcare more expensive. Currently, corporate hospitals are deploying HIS as they are in a position to sustain the huge investment. Healthcare in India is just beginning to realise the importance of integrated, configurable systems. “It will take a couple of years to reach a level of maturity. With stress on international quality standards and best practices, an attempt has been made to imbibe the same in IT systems,” adds Shenoy.

Medical tourism is not a major factor for technology implementation in Indian hospitals. The greater chunk of such tourism comes from India and its neighbouring countries. Having said that, if systems are in place, it might just boost tourism. “Patients are the same whether national or international; however, the expectations of foreign patients are usually a little higher,” comments Mahesh Shinde, CIO of Hinduja Hospital in Mumbai.

The central Ministry of IT has created a sourcebook, A Proposed Framework for IT Infrastructure for Healthcare in India. The document speaks of being an initiative towards standardising and seamlessly integrating the various sectors of healthcare on common platforms to bring in economies of scale. Its implementation is, however, yet to see daylight. The healthcare industry in India is also trying to bridge the gap between technology and medical needs.

The Medical Computer Society of India (MCSI) believes that some medical institutions in the west have already spent millions of dollars only to later realise that some systems do not suit their purposes. They fear that a similar scenario of haphazard deployment of medical software systems is going to follow in our country as well. To avoid such a situation, the institute co-ordinates the expertise of specialised doctors who have an interest in bringing technology to healthcare.

A team effort

Hospitals which have deployed HIS have solutions from different vendors with the in-house IT department building a lot of the modules. A case in point is Fortis. “We had tried to deploy the European system, but that did not work out. The Indian medical system is largely private as opposed to the European system. Hence we were left with no choice but to develop our own,” says Kapoor.

Others such as Wockhardt have worked with vendors. Wipro developed a core ERP called HIS Version 2.0 with inputs from Wockhardt and Harvard Medical International, US. The local IT team developed some tools and MIS around an ERP.

Much of the automated lab equipment and EPABX systems interact with the HIS, ensuring the data flow, and avoiding duplication and error. This medical equipment and related software is sourced from different vendors, says Shenoy.

This system is being deployed in Mumbai and Nagpur, and is based on Microsoft Windows Server with modules that cater to all functions—from administration and marketing to billing and health check-ups.