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June - 2013 issue

Healthcare IT has no Space for Errors

By Harinath Chakravarthy, Group CIO, Nova Medical Centers

Nova group of Medical Centers is the parent Company of Nova Specialty Surgery and Nova IVI Fertility. It currently has ten specialty surgery centers and five In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) Clinics.

Everything on Real Time

The model on which Nova works is doctor owned and doctor managed. The IT sector in healthcare is relatively insulated, but I had to make sure that a lot of the services and facilities that I outsource are perfectly integrated with our technology solutions need. We are working on three fronts: patients booking an appointment, doctors seeking to understand the status of their admitted inpatients, and on-duty doctors and nurses who have to update continuously everything from vital time to what drugs have been administered to a patient; all on the real time basis. And this is one of the biggest challenges that we CIOs have to overcome in the healthcare sector and we do not have any space for errors.

Need of the Hour

20 years ago, each division of healthcare was segregated into small but important departments for different specializations. In our demographic ages and variety of new conditions that we are battling; it is critical for everybody in the treatment chain to be fully aware of what is happening. It could be new development in the field, trends and patterns, or accessing a patient's record.

It is important to have utmost information available transparently but with one rider which has to be secure. This is something we have undertaken in Nova and are able to give you more personalized level of services.

Trends and Emerging Technologies

All the laboratory equipments, X-ray, MRI and others are far more IT enabled and available for general communication, which means they are able to talk to each other and transmit messages over common standards. People are able to focus on getting the job done rather than trying to figure out what should happen. Due to the integration of the entire technology these kinds of decision support systems are going to change.

The Pain Points

The larger challenge today is the level of technology with the insurance companies. They have been slow on the uptake in kind of migrating towards IT. We have to physically go back and forth between us and sometimes when patients are awaiting surgery, that is often slightly a wrong cycle. Also, local physicians especially in the out skirts are not online and if we are able to solve these puzzles we will be able to start scaling this model.

When talking about the solution providers, the major challenge is understanding the healthcare sector itself. It is important to understand how the backend runs. Healthcare IT solutions are very far more tight and unforgivable when it comes to mistakes.

We are working to make sure that everything is on a single platform and on that single platform everybody should be connected to make the right decision.