Role of IT in small-medium hospitals

Prasad Nagool CEO, ITShastra India

Information Technology (IT) has the potential to improve the quality and efficiency of a hospital or healthcare centre. It allows healthcare providers to collect, store, retrieve and transfer information electronically. IT allows swift decision makings that are the key to controlling cost and improving patient care.

Why do hospitals need IT?

• For standardising the systems
• To make the system person independent
• Easy for a person to know the hospital philosophy
• Reduction in the erroneous billing
• Bill estimators helps in reducing friction at final billing
• Fraud prevention
• Ease in finding patient records
• High rate of TPA billing clearance due to computerised entry
• Auto generation of mandatory registers (Form F, 3C Registers)
• Compliance and regulatory requirements
• MIS reports

Infrastructure selection

Infra selection consists of:

• Identification: Needs vs wants
• Proper vendor selection: Budgets, references
• Implementation: Implementation and training

IT for smaller hospital is a challenging task as it demands striking right balance in the Needs vs Wants.

There has to be a blend of Needs and Wants as there is:

• Perceived quality of service by patients
• Industry practices
• Compliance and regulations
• The needs are also driven by the demographics i.e. city, location and locality

Main components of IT requirement

• Hardware
• Networking
• Software/ application

Factors to consider before finalising software

• Ease of use to the staff (Fraud proof yet flexible)
• CIA: Confidentiality + Integrity and easy availability of the data
• TPA billing (if hospital is enrolled with insurance companies)
• Compliance and statutory reports (Form 3C reports, Form F)
• Easy backup and restore

Contents of the software

• Three main areas that should be covered are
  1. Medical records should cover history, investigations, diagnosis, medications and discharge details
  2. Accounting should cover billing, payment receivables, P&L statements, balance sheets, payroll and tally integration (optional)
  3. Administration should cover consents, letters and certificates, staff scheduling and staff attendance
• Easy patient search: Provision to search patient by his name, mobile number, unique identification number (Patient ID), blood group, diagnosis
• Ease of use: Software should have less mouse clicks, more shortcuts and quick help
• Patient centric approach: In patient-centric approach, once a patient is selected on screen, all the services administered and required for him should be available in single screen, let it be regular services, radiology services, pathology services, inventory given to patient and operation charges. So there is no need to open new screens for each module entries, which saves lot of time.
• Roles and privileges: The software should have role- based access for security purpose so the administrator will have complete access to the system. The medical staff will have access only to medical records and other departments can access their part of jobs.
• MIS reports: The MIS reports should help in
  1. Quick response to the hospital administrators helping them to significantly improve their operational cost
  2. Evaluate hospital performance and cost
  3. Projection of the long-term forecast.
  4. Administration of hospitals daily business transactions like financial, personnel, payroll, bed census etc.

Things to consider while selecting the vendor:

• Vendor’s installation experiences
• Terms of service and support
• Annual maintenance cost
• Client list

Implementation and training

• Setting up the system as per laid out requirements
• Awareness training for users
• Detailed training for selected person as per job category
• Feedback from users

Maintaining and updating IT infrastructure

• Hardware and networking: SLA with the vendors, buyback plans, phased out replacement
• Software: Patch updates, AMC with vendors, apply antivirus patches

ITShastra established in 2001, is a one-stop solution to all IT design and development needs. As an ISO 9001, ISO 27001, CMMI Level 3 and Microsoft certified partner company based in Mumbai, ITShastra is incorporated with a mission to assist clients achieve business goals and get the maximum ROI on their IT investments. ITShastra is expertise in the design and development of robust and scalable web and mobile applications development.