Hyderabad: With vast amounts of medical data generated each year, many small and medium-sized healthcare enterprises are opting for cloud technology to store, access and share data, to reduce operational costs and increase efficiency.
Unlike large super-speciality hospitals that have in-house technology for managing data, SMEs in the healthcare space – mainly 25-50-bed hospitals – are opting for cloud technology.
Hyderabad-based Razi Healthcare, which has 50 primary care hospitals across India, has adopted iON – a branded on-demand cloud computing offering from Tata Consultancy Services – to digitise patient-care profiles with electronic medical records (EMRs) for easy access and more accurate treatment.
“Hospitals are using technology and cloud service for maintaining patient medical records, monitoring of patients, billing and payroll, to maximise resource utilisation at low cost and to improve doctor-patient understanding through electronic health records (EHRs), electronic medical records (EMRs), healthcare management and information systems (HMIS), picture archiving and communications systems (PACS), and point of care systems,” said Suresh, chief information officer, SevenHills’s e-health.
e-health is a part of Visakhapatnam-based SevenHills Healthcare Pvt Ltd, a web-enabled hospital management solution (HMS) that provides end-to-end solutions to medical players, where doctors and staff can access the stored data from anywhere through the web.
e-health is the country’s first paperless hospital model, where every patient is allotted a unique health identification card (UHID) at the time of registration. UHID provides complete details of the patient’s medical history as recorded in SevenHills’s e-health suite.
“Currently, there are only five or six full-fledged paperless hospitals in India, and seeing the high storage cost, more hospitals are looking to go paperless (which saves Rs 3 lakh storage cost for a 150-bed hospital),” Suresh said.
The Indian healthcare industry was estimated at $40 billion in 2010, and is expected to reach $280 billion by 2020. According to Frost & Sullivan reports, spending on IT by Indian healthcare players was estimated at $244 million in 2010 and is expected to grow at 22 per cent a year over the next 10 years.
“In this case, use of the cloud-based platform helps in reducing the IT cost of healthcare players, in the face of continued margin pressures and critical need to generate and store large amounts of health data,” Suresh said.
The cloud infrastructure allows hospitals to store data in multiple virtual platforms, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and the service can be set up both on or off-premise.
Globally, cloud adoption by medical players is increasing. Currently, around 32 per cent of healthcare players use cloud service globally, and this is expected to go up to 83 per cent by 2016. However, cloud adoption in India is minimal, Sambamurthy Margam, managing director, Exleaz Consulting Limited, said, quoting a recent report.
“Seeing the potential, cloud adoption across sectors is expected to grow at a very high rate in the country,” he added. Exleaz Consulting, a web-based server having a wholly-owned subsidiary in Hyderabad, recently launched its cloud-based hospital management services (HMS) – MediEaz, a patient-centric, modular single unified database – in India.
MediEaz uses cloud computing services and provides the full range of clinical, administrative and lab capabilities which are linked by a single data repository. It helps businesses save up to 95 per cent of carbon emitted by on-premise servers.
“Among the cloud platforms, cloud IaaS services lower the barriers to market growth by minimising technology costs and upfront investments for small and medium healthcare players,” Suresh said.
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