Apollo Hospital: Vaulting to Success

R Srinivasan, Apollo Hospital

Delhi-based Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, part of a large chain of hospitals,
has been India's poster boy for modern healthcare services. The automation
initiatives have been one of the key factors that have helped the hospital
revolutionize healthcare services delivery in the country.

IT has been helpful in instilling patient's confidence in terms of hospital's
accuracy, reliability and speedy/efficient treatment. At the heart of Apollo's
IT set-up is its core application of Hospital Information System (HIS). HIS is
the single integrated application, which is automated to take care of each
department and is the single application window with several modules for all the
medical care departments. The software automates the entire process, right from
the point of the patient's admission to his/her discharge. For finance
functions, the hospital uses Tally software.

Another key application for the hospital is Medclick, which is essentially a
medical drugs library. With this application, the doctor can simply post the
generic name and, automatically, all the products listed will be shown. So, if a
particular brand is not available, the doctor can recommend an alternative brand
just by looking at the list.

IT crucially aligned to the hospital's day-to-day operations, but even the
critical equipment for patient care work on PCs and servers. Time is a very
critical factor in the delivery of healthcare services, and automation helps
manage it with by reducing manual handling.

Indraprastha Apollo started its call center initiative in 2004 with an
in-house developed package. Presently, its functionality is restricted to being
an information center, passing information related to the hospital and its
services to the callers. It's now working on building on this base model, and
will be introducing its toll-free number services in the next few months. A key
landmark in the hospital's IT set-up has been its telemedicine initiative.
This allows patients in remote locations to have access to the hospital's
medical resources and expertise. The initiative has helped in giving an edge to
both the doctors and patients in terms of availability of speedy and quality
treatment. This service is currently available at more than 50 centres across
India, and overseas as well.

Indraprastha Apollo hospital plans to integrate with all the other Apollo
Group hospitals, and is also planning Wi-Fi services for providing internet
access to the patients. As part of the broader initiative, work is underway on
implementing an intranet for the employees and doctors to have easy access to
shared information like policies and procedures.