The healthcare industry is the world’s largest industry with global revenues of an estimated $2.8 trillion. Since India’s ever growing population makes it an important player in the industry there is a need for scalable and pocket friendly technologies for healthcare. Additionally, there is a dire need for cost-effective equipments and instruments for screening and diagnosis at the ‘Point of Care’. Moreover, as healthcare organizations increasingly share patient information among providers, patients and payers, it stresses not just on the importance of security and privacy but also on the need for international standards in messaging, codes and vocabulary, content and format standards. Headquartered in Kolkata, AptSource Software founded by Manisha Chowdhury and Sreekumar Banerjee is a company focused into building solutions for Healthcare providers across the globe. Aptcare, a comprehensive and configurable practice management solution from AptSource, conforms to international standards at all levels. The company furnishes derivative web based solutions based on Aptcare for specialty, rehabilitation, and community health settings. “The derivatives address specific requirements of clinic offerings specialty care ranging from diabetics, chronic ailments, smoking, and alcohol to drug cessation management,” says Manisha Chowdhury – Co-founder and Managing Director. The product is enabled with standard treatment protocols and care pathways for specific diseases that can be configured using suitable versions of the product. This helps in easy contextualization, workflow automation and disease assessments. Moreover, coupled with a rich analytical component, the product derives inferences and helps clients to predict on the future clinical conditions.

Offering Flexible Solutions
AptcareHMS, the base product from the company is created on a domain model thereby leaving the practice of healthcare in the hands of healthcare providers and not software designers. Rather than forcing the clinicians to adhere to the system’s process, the system adjusts itself to accommodate the diverse range of clinicians and their institutions by customizing data structures, screens, processes and so on. This allows room for rapid implementation through customization techniques using scripts rather than having to change codebase. The solution further has the capability to embed treatment protocol that is adapted from local, national and international guidelines that can be configured using a simple toolkit. Although the company is perceived more as a product vendor, AptSource takes pride in its solution consulting services that encompasses Enterprise IT Strategy, Health care Informatics, Maturity Planning & Execution and algorithms related to disease prevention. “We work with partner companies in the UK on several such projects for NHS and its endorsed partners and our senior experts from the core team helps build domain competencies,” says Sreekumar Banerjee, Co-Founder and CTO.

Meeting the requirements of challenging clients
AptSource realizes that their main challenge while offering solutions to the Indian markets is to accede on the right solution. “The importance of EHR (accessible anytime anywhere), patient communication tools and care workflow automation is not yet recognized on a large scale. Additionally, patient data sensitivity is taken lightly in most cases while the potential to use such information using right protocols and tools for disease prevention have not been tapped in yet” adds Manisha. The company intends to set this right by virtue of their products and solutions.

Envisioning a future where healthcare organizations transition from a localized to Globalized information systems, AptSource suggests that the clients will become increasingly patient centric, and shift from numeric to complex forms of data. “Aptcare has an extremely flexible design and can easily align with global or specific standards of care. Aptcare can be customized for varied practices in terms of form content, organization of data on screen, inbound /outbound interfaces, standard databases etc,” says Sreekumar. Further, the architectural direction significantly reduces the risk, cost and time of implementation, rollout, maintenance and upgrade. Along the same line, Aptcare has built in adaptors to support integration with any existing Pharmacy, Radiology/LIS/RIS system.

Road ahead
Blessed with a motivated workforce, AptSource leverages its years of expertise and successful methodologies to provide innovative solutions. The company through strategic alliances and partnerships, bridge the gap between the technocrats and clinical experts, and is looking forward to build more lasting relationships based on trust like it has always been doing so since its inception. “We do feel comfortable to take up newer challenges with our product Aptcare and also continuously train and upgrade skills of our consultants to be able to recommend forward looking solutions to our clients,” conclude the co-founders in unison.