Digital Transformation for Small to Medium Hospitals

In 2005 the World Health Assembly urged its Member States “to consider drawing up a long-term strategic plan for developing and implementing e-Health services…to develop the infrastructure for information and communication technologies for health…to promote equitable, affordable and universal access to their benefits.” (Ref: resolution WHA58.28 on eHealth). Since then, 16 years have been passed and we need to review where we stand today in terms of eHealth & digital technology usage in healthcare.

Before starting to look at the status, we need to be clear what are the expectations from technology, what outcomes it can create in Healthcare. This is a vast area and it includes various aspect of technology in healthcare including below and more.

• Role of Digital healthcare system for small to medium hospitals to improve patient experience, quality of care and operational revenue

• Technology for bridging the access gap on high quality care

• Making healthcare affordable

• Advance diagnostics including application of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Personalized and precision medicine

• Accelerated drug research and innovation with Technology

We can start the exploration with digital healthcare system for small to medium hospitals. You might wonder why small to medium hospital. The reason is that 68% of hospital based care is provided by Private Hospitals as per NSSO (Ref : nss_rep574.pdf (mospi.nic.in) ) and major part of Private hospitals are small to medium hospitals. To strengthen small to medium hospitals they need newer modern ways of organizing & supporting patient services. This is important as they not only need to compete with larger hospitals having technology edge and optimized cost but also need to fulfil increasingly demanding patients' experience. Digital technology and systems can fulfil these demands but unfortunately hospital systems are not being designed for these hospitals. As a result, most of the hospital management system are either costly or overengineered for these small to medium hospitals. Moreover, focus of most of the hospital management system is towards admin related activities and resource utilization. For example, these hospitals may not require Blood bank module or PACS or other such subsystem and investing time and money in these hospital management system is waste for them. So clearly if we want to strengthen small to medium hospitals, we need new type of Digital systems which Modernize Patient Services without IT workforce & costly Infrastructure.

System should cover following aspects which will help in digital transformation of small to medium hospitals

• Single platform covering Hospital processes, Patient Engagement, Marketing, Admin functions & Analytics

• It should be useful for Quality management meeting NABH requirements

• It must have provision to maintain Patient Records for compliance

• It should be built on modern technology, with access from anywhere, anytime using Mobile, Laptop or Desktop.

With advancement of digital technologies, now new breed of platforms and solutions are coming up. They are cloud based and accessible from Mobile, Laptop or Desktop.

Key advantage of cloud-based system is that they completely remove the upfront heavy investment on Server, building infrastructure, air conditioning etc. They also remove several running costs including server maintenance, IT team, power, blocked room etc…

Besides cost there are other key benefits as well with cloud-based systems

* It removes need for IT support team, as most of the providers support the solution centrally

* They are better secured as these systems are often hosted on servers of cloud providers like Microsoft, Amazon etc. These big cloud server providers invest billions of dollars in securing their servers and data centers, which is nearly impossible for small setup.

* Any advancement in technology and functional upgrade is made available to the hospitals immediately.

* Cloud based systems also provide Patient Portal & App which is useful for delivering patient services

Clearly a true digital transformation of small and medium hospital can happen with cloud based, low-cost system covering functional modules for

* Clinicians and assistants: Appointment management, Digital prescriptions, IPD records, Discharge summaries, teleconsultation

* Patients : Connect with doctors, EMR, Alerts & Reminders , Tele-consultation, Digital payments

* Pharmacy : prescription linked medicine dispensing, billing and inventory

*Administrators : Billing, Analytics , reports for QA team, queue management, Patient educational & Marketing campaigns, Patient record storage