We have applied a Six Sigma approach in medical care

Son of Former President of India, Late Fakhruddin Ali
Ahmed, Dr Pervez Ahmed, CEO of Max Healthcare has raised the bar and set
standards, bringing radical changes at Max Healthcare by promoting and
encouraging usage of technology in its infrastructure. Influenced by his
grandfather who was a physician, Dr Ahmed nurtured his ambition of becoming a
doctor since childhood. He has been able to bring in more accountability,
introduce quality parameters leading to transparency at Max. In an exclusive
interview with Dataquest, Dr Ahmed talks about the relevance and importance of
IT and how would it enable the user community in hospitals to increase
efficiency in their work culture. Excerpts

I ts been a year now as the CEO of Max Healthcare.
What have been your strategies to improve operational efficiencies at Max
Healthcare?We have some ongoing processes which we have been following for
years. We take one particular department and carry out some initiatives there.
Later we make it applicable to other departments. There are certain parameters
we look at such as mobility, mortality, surgical departments, patients
re-operated on after initial procedures, incidents of infection which is
followed for each department. We call it quality parameters. The data we have
been managing and calculating in the past two to three years comes under these
parameters. We have applied a Six Sigma approach in medical care to improve our
processes. For example, we followed the Six Sigma approach in catheter related
blood stream infection in intensive care units. We found a root cause analysis,
created a robust plan around it, and reduced the catheter related blood stream
infection to zero. These are some initiatives that we have done in one
department, and would follow the same approach in other departments across Max.

You have been responsible for bridging the gap between
clinical and non-clinical systems at Max. How important is IT for your
organization?

I attach a lot of importance to IT at Max Healthcare. We have been using the
hospital information system (HIS) application from the financial and accounting
perspective. Recently, we have also signed a deal with Perot-Dell for IT support
and data networking while also fully transitioning towards electronic health
record systems. We plan to reach level 5 or level 6 IT provider. Level 7 is
completely paperless, and no hospital has reached that level. So, Max is
reaching the point where processes and CPOE, tracking, business analytics and
medical error reduction will improve, thereby bridging the gap between clinical
and non-clinical departments, thus enabling better communication and business
intelligence.

What are the strategic values of outsourcing in the
healthcare vertical?

We have been doing some outsourcing, especially in areas such as
housekeeping at Max. Since the housekeeping staff comes from a class which is
not so educated; they are tough to discipline, more likely to unionize, and have
higher rates of attrition. Therefore, we have a strategy in place, particularly
in outsourcing for housekeeping. From an IT perspective, our core strength is
not technology, but we obviously require services of an IT department. Doing it
ourselves is a cumbersome and expensive task, so outsourcing IT to people who
are experts in the field is a better and an efficient model; and cost-effective
too.

You have been a strong supporter of technology, especially
cloud services at Max Healthcare. How are you aligning IT with your business
needs?

I look at IT as an enabler and new technologies can improve the processes in
healthcare. There are business analytics in healthcare which has a lot to do
with the opportunity to access data and convert that data into valuable
information. The role of IT as an enabler is huge, and can help reduce cost and
also reduce medical errors and adverse events in medical care. All this can
become easier if we have IT in place which can track and measure proactively
rather than go for a standard manual approach, while improving the efficiency
model. Max Healthcare has plans to go for new technologies such as cloud since
we see a lot of benefits for the healthcare vertical in particular.

What are the unique IT challenges in the healthcare
vertical? How did you address these issues?

We are in the process of implementing a new program called the electronic
health records (EHR), and one of the challenges we have is the adoption of
applications. For example, clinical references group gives inputs to the IT
department who then make sure that the current processes are in place. However,
the adoption of such applications by users is low owing to cultural issues. One
would have to create India-centric IT solutions which suits Indian users as per
their requirements and help achieve efficiencies. We have a set of people at
various levels, and we are monitoring them closely in terms of the progress made
in adopting the application by users.

What are your views on technology usage in the Indian
healthcare sector vis--vis global counterparts. Is technology adoption in
Indian hospitals in sync with their global counterparts?

In corporate and large hospitals, almost everyone is using the AGT patient
accounting, hospital information system (HIS) and some basic business HR model.
The integration from these models to electronic health records is very sporadic
as some places have it and some dont. If one needs to leverage IT for
maintaining costs and reducing healthcare costs, one actually has to be able to
share the information from one provider source to another because if a patient
has been investigated previously, it is obviously not required for us to
re-investigate the patient. This kind of information sharing will be of great
value for insurance companies, for regulatory compliance, and also for
providers. However, we havent achieved this level as yet.

PC Suraj

surajp@cybermedia.co.in