Aiming for a better AIIMS: Hitachi India will help streamline operations

As a casual visitor, you would argue that the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in the national capital is a hotbed of activity and chaos on any given day. At its calmest moments, it resembles the Rajiv Chowk metro station at peak hours.

You could be forgiven for thinking there is no method to the madness, except that there is. Over 3.3 million outpatients are treated at the facility every year. On a daily basis, there are over 800 doctors at the hospital. Four thousand nurses are on its roll. 200,000-plus patients are admitted in a year, and close to 200,000 surgeries are performed in the same period. No one has counted the footfall, but it suffices to say that thousands of people enter and leave the premises daily.

In this milieu of intense daily commotion, Hitachi India is working on a “Green AIIMS” concept by which the government of India — in collaboration with the Japanese government — aims to reduce the power consumption at AIIMS by 30 per cent over the next three years. After a feasibility study in 2015-16, the main project commenced in March 2017.

The ministry of health and family welfare is facilitating the project, which is to be concluded by March 2020. The funding is coming from the Japanese government. In fact, a decision on its funding was taken following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Japan in 2014.

Shusuke Onodera, head of the health care business for Hitachi (it sells medical equipment like MRI and CT scan machines) in India, says the project will have two distinct modules. Close to 25-30 people from Hitachi, Japan, are likely to fly to India to work on the project.

In the first phase, Hitachi will install a new photovoltaic power generation facility, update existing facilities such as chiller, replace the LED lighting system, and build a system to carry out control, grasp and monitoring of status of energy consumption of the entire hospital. A solar power panel will also be installed. Hitachi’s engineers, who did the feasibility study, found that some of the existing equipment at AIIMS are very old and as a result, underperformance is common. This leads to a higher consumption of power than ideal.

But, the most important change — from patients’ and doctors’ point of view — is likely to come next year in the form of a common IT platform that will allow doctors to access all test results conducted on the same patient by different departments on one computer.

As anyone who has been to AIIMS will testify, there are endless lines of patients waiting, no matter which department one heads towards. This is partly due to the sheer volume of patients, but it’s also partly due to the inefficient functioning of the system.

As things stand today, patients’ data are stored individually and there is no system to access all tests done on the same patient within the hospital. So, if a patient has had an MRI, a CT-scan and other tests, they are all stored separately, leading to significant delay. “Individual reports have to be collected — usually physically — from each department for a patient to get a final diagnosis from the doctor under whose care he is,” explains Onodera.