Remember Arthur Hailey's path-breaking novel The Final Diagnosis, where we
get a picture of how an automated infrastructure redefined the working of a
hospital in the US-this in the 1960s. Barring a handful, even today, India
does not have hospitals that would match Hailey's picture.
Some sociologists would scoff at talks on technological innovations in
healthcare, a few others would pass it of as an elitist fad in a country where
nearly half the billion plus population has no means of access-even to the
basic healthcare. No doubt, specialty hospitals like Apollo, Fortis, Max or
Escorts, that claim to have redefined contemporary healthcare in India through a
corporatized IT culture, still pander to the rich and famous-a mere minority
of the country's population, while the primary healthcare centers in rural
areas do not have even basic medicines, forget a modern IT infrastructure.
However, perhaps this could be one sector where a top-down development model
can seriously work out to the benefits of the masses. While it might be naive to
think that technologically advanced hospitals that have come up in recent years
would suddenly become affordable to all, the government hospitals can learn
about extensive automation in association with some of these elite healthcare
institutions in the country. And, fortunately, this trend seems to be
increasingly catching up-many state government hospitals in Karnataka, Tamil
Nadu, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Delhi are adopting a hub-and-spoke network
model, whereby they can offer remote telemedicine and even go for basic
requirements such as archiving patient records.
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Skeptics still argue that most of the elitist hospitals do not care much
about attending to the teeming millions, but at least their very presence in the
country can instigate a healthcare revolution, sooner or later. And perhaps it
would be unfair to tar all of them with a single brush stroke. Significant
humane initiatives, fuelled by IT, have been initiated by some of these elitist
hospitals-Apollo Telemedicine Enterprises (ATEL), the telemedicine division of
the Apollo Hospitals Group, has already set up over 10 telemedicine links
between the Apollo Institutions at Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai and distant
locations across the country. It even hands out short term loans to its
telemedicine partners in remote places for the initial financing of the
telemedicine equipment. Fortis' hub-and-spoke hospital network too has catered
to remote treatment of patients, especially in the northern parts of the
country.
While telemedicine undoubtedly has a special significance in a vast country
like India, in reaching out to people in remote places, IT's biggest
contribution to healthcare has been the development of a hospital information
system (HIS)-a sort of ERP for hospitals that takes care of different
functionalities related to patients, doctors, medicines, treatment and
instruments. Since it would be difficult to customize a generic ERP, most of
these HIS solutions, be it Escort's MedTrak or the one from Max, have
generally been developed in-house. Other than HIS, electronic archiving of
medical records is gradually becoming mainstream, as it is not only helping in
early diagnosis but also improving the general efficiencies in hospitals.