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 RIVEN by a ned to offer improved and competent patient-care services, Mumbai based P D Hinduja National Hospital & Medical Research Center has redesigned its computer operations. Now, an integrated management solution covers major areas of its operations.
The in-patient, 360-bed hospital offers comprehensive services from diagnosis and investigation to therapy, surgery and post operation care. A clinic, outpatient and ambulatory department, a library, a medical records center and a school of Nursing complement the hospital. The hospital caters to over 1,300 outpatient cases daily and has a staff of 1,800 employees including 200 consulting doctors.
In its quest to offer "total patient care", Hinduja Hospital is implementing an open systems solution, based on the sun Solaris hardware that provides the hospital with a fitting platform to run an integrated hospital management system.
The hospital's history with in house computerization began in 1988-89 when it installed an IBM System 38, followed by Data General's Aviion 4600 hardware in 1993 that both proved inadequate. As its needs increased it opted for Compaq's Proliant 5000 server systems and SCO UNIX as the OS for front-end interface. That too failed to meet its requirements.
As the volume of work increased it became imperative to deliver timely service to patients. One of its crucial needs was to have an efficient patient care & billing system for prompt, post- discharge settlement of patient accounts. "We wanted to ensure a speedy billing process and speedier bill-processing system so patients would not have to wait long after discharge," said Mahesh Shinde, manager, information technology, Hinduja Hospital.
The hospital looked for an operating platform that would run across the enterprise and integrate all its functional areas. In addition to being non-proprietary, reliable, manageable and highly powerful to handle its enormous database, the system had to offer Symmetrical Multi Processing to manage an advanced RDBMS system.
One of the concerns was that the new platform should be uncomplicated to manage and easy to get trained manpower for. A major constraint faced by the hospital at that time was to overcome disparities in ecords, owing to a significant level of manual entries involved that was degrading the speed of the system and bringing down efficiency levels.
After extensive evaluation, the hospital opted for Sun Solaris Enterprise Version 3500, dual processors based systems that supports Sun Solaris 2.7 operating system having Sun storage box A5100 and Oracle database management system. Its clients are based on PIII 800 MHz machines and run under windows 98 operating environment. The software was developed in house with help from a consultant. "We have integrated and computerised 28 key applications that cover 80 per cent of our operations," said Shinde.
The hospital first took up migration of patient care & billing, and enhanced the system to include all areas under patient care. "We took this activity up across the entire hospital instead of taking up department-wise or module-wise," said Shinde. This was followed by other application.
More importantly, patient care & billing was to be integrated with other related areas such as diagnosis & investigations, surgical and administration. This streamlined its functions across the enterprise. "To make matters easy, we even standardized on key procedures for both inpatient and outpatient billing that proved to be of great benefit."
As a result, patient care improved dramatically. "The idea was to cut down patient movement within the hospital and that boosted our efficiency levels in service and facilitated payment of bills from any counter," said Shinde, "The new system allows us to fetch better information processing results. This is useful to hospitals where computer expertise is often limited," he said.
The solution has helped the hospital accomplish major systems goals. "In addition to achieving optimal resource management, we also benefited by its ease of administration," Shinde explained.
Apart from all medical reports being available to doctors online, the system has protected database from corruption and crashes, and that has eased problems, said Shinde. More over, the successful result has had a direct bearing on the hospital's profitability, "Our revenue have shot up significantly with respect to billing in the outpatient department," he added.
The new system has also helped the hospital eliminate discrepancies in disbursement of fees to doctors for services rendered that arose owing to errors in records maintained by individual doctors and the hospital.
Future plans include having complete medical records of patients stored in a database, online consulting and telemedicine, a service that allows long distance reading of x-rays, evaluation of CAT scan and others.
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