Bhoopendra Solanki, CIO, Sakra World Hospital speaks exclusively to APAC News Network about how the Japanese lineage of the hospital makes it easier to adopt smart technologies
How is Sakra World Hospital using advanced technologies like robotics and analytics to enhance its operational efficiency?
The Sakra World Hospital in Bengaluru is the first FDI- led hospital in India founded in February 2014. Later in September 2019, Sakra came up with a premium clinic in Bengaluru city only. It is a Japanese JV of Secom Hospitals & Toyota Tsusho. So being a Japanese management, they believe more in technology driven business outcomes instead of human-driven. We are therefore leveraging many cutting edge technologies, including robots in Rehabilitation, Orthopaedics, Neurosciences etc. to provide precise, quality & agile clinical care.
Now we have also started to utilize the digitized data for better and timely care. For example, health checks that should happen every year to prevent any future diseases and the system reminds the patients automatically. Like, breast cancer becoming common in 40+ women and so we conduct awareness programs and create packages from time to time. The system sends the communications to women only who are 40 plus in age.
What has been the new business model and best practices that have been established at Sakra post pandemic?
Post pandemic, the management decided to increase the outreach to remote areas and homecare with the help of various available technologies. Till now the approach in healthcare was “patients to doctor or hospital” now post Covid we have changed it to “doctor or hospital to patient’s door steps”.
Lean management is also one of the factors to provide affordable clinical care with the help of technology.
How is your virtual consultation model integrated with e-commerce apps and what are the business models involved?
Sakra Hospital has its own mobile app and web portal. For virtual consultation, the system allows patients to record or upload their documents/prescriptions into Sakra patients App. Subsequently, once the patients visit the Sakra Hospital or its clinic, the doctor can find the patient’s complete history which helps them to understand the patient problem precisely and provide better treatment.
Step down ICU is helping a lot with this virtual care or home care. This allows us to treat less critical patients, who are unable to walk or unable to reach hospital, at their homes only. Most Indian families are also nuclear so they do not have many people as an attendant with the patients at the hospital, and so this virtual care solves this problem.
How is the HIS integrated with UHID in the Sakra World Hospital?
UHID is the integral part of the HIS. So whenever registration is happening, HIS generates one sequence number with the pre-defined prefix. There is no challenge in this currently.
What will be the future technology roadmap for the Sakra World Hospital over the next 18-24 months?
Being a Japanese venture, there is too much belief in technology at Sakra. Now all we know is that without technology we cannot even think of any business operations/process.
We have automated the OPD for patients end to end. If patients take the appointment with online payment, the day he is visiting the hospital, the check-in option enables (Geofencing) within Sakra mobile app. There are also kiosks in each OPD, where patients can do the check-in via either Sakra Mobile App or kiosks.
Thereafter patients’ masked names start reflecting into Nursing Assessment Desk or doctor QMS based on the pre-defined flow of patients. The doctor calls the patients via their computer, patients go to the doctor’s room and consult. The doctor then feeds the EMR and thereby complete the consultation.
On Immediate completion of the consultation, the prescription is triggered to the patient’s email ID, WhatsApp and start reflecting on the Sakra Patients App. So in this whole OPD patient’s journey, no manual intervention is there. Also, the relevant prescribed info like medicine, diagnostics, investigations go to the relevant co-ordinators for close co-ordination to help the patients in real time.
Our next target is to automate the manual processes with the help of suitable technology for IPD patients’ journey & we are naming it as “Smart IPD Room Solution”.
Currently, nurse and other clinical staffs spend time going to/from nursing station from/to patients’ room to update any info into the IT system/HIS. We want to kill this unproductive effort and time so that clinical staff can spend more time with the patients for their recovery. This solution will help to digitize the manual data and make the system error free or free of delayed feeding of the information. We want to bring the IPD EMR as well so clinical staff can update the parameters then and there with the proper notifications and escalations to better clinical outcomes.
What we are planning is that we will fix a touch screen display per bed across wards so that clinical staff can feed or record the parameter or clinical notes within the patients room on real time. This arrangement will increase the operational efficiency of the clinical staff and reduce the clinical errors.
( Neha Pal & Rajneesh De, APAC News Network )
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