After changing the transactional efficiencies in financial and manufacturing industry, I strongly believe that technology is ready for healthcare.

With advancement of technology in medical devices and availability of strong analytical engines, the focus will move to early diagnosis.

Also, the whole world is focusing on innovative ways to reduce healthcare costs. Coupled with that are steps for standardisation of information to enable portability of data. Healthcare providers are now creating strategies to convert their ‘Hospitals’ to ‘Care Providers’.

The clinicians are relying more on IT systems as they now provide better performance, scalability, and reliability with techniques like auto load balancing, clustering and virtualisation.

Healthcare is an industry that works 24x7x365, with virtually no ‘holiday’ across the year. This not only puts a lot of pressure on the systems but the quality of life of care providers. Some of the new collaboration techniques not only help in saving lives but help improve the work life balance for these clinicians.

We at Max Healthcare have also started on a journey of implementation of a system to capture electronic health records of patients. The thought is also to integrate the fragmented data about patients in different forms to one window to bring-in focused care. The product will maintain complete patient history, information on all drug allergies and past medical records of patients. I strongly believe that over a period, we will be able to clinically aggregate this data and provide better care to our customers.

Analytics on this data can help us move from curative to preventive healthcare. Also built-in support tools like the drug database can ensure that there are no drug-to-drug interactions on the patients.

I also see an emergence of lot of low cost innovative tools to support data flow, handwriting and voice recognition. We will additionally see some new and small medical devices to reach the remote patient. I already see a large number of initiatives in healthcare industry across on dynamic queue and resource management to improve patient satisfaction.

BY DR. NEENA PAHUJA CIO, Max Healthcare

THE AUTHOR has more than 24 years of software development, consulting and internal IT support experience.