Wockhardt Hospitals had ambitious plans of expanding its healthcare operations and integrating the information & management systems across its chain of hospitals to improve management and the services it provided to patients. IT was seen as a facilitator of the integration process which could also ease day-to-day operations and free the management to concentrate wholly on patient care.

The company implemented the Wipro Hospital Information Resource Planning System at its hospitals in Mumbai and Nagpur. This is a Hospital Information System (HIS) based on Microsoft Windows Server with modules that cater to all functions of a hospital from administration and marketing to billing and health check-ups.

According to Suresh Shenoy, Vice-president, IT, Wockhardt, "The solution deployed by us has resulted in improved patient care, and better manpower and inventory management." The use of IT-enabled services has also resulted in a substantial cost benefit to the organisation, and decreased the scope for human error.

IT Challenges

As part of its expansion plans, Wockhardt needed a solution that would not only incorporate patient management functions, but also integrate the various hospitals in its chain so that the management could plan its operations better.

Shenoy says, "The solution we needed had to not only harmonise the functions of the outpatient and inpatient departments, but also ensure that the required patient information was available to the department concerned." In addition, it had to also identify and organise the commercial processes involved in hospital administration. "The solution had to be user-friendly and have the capacity to analyse the financial performance of all the hospitals in the Wockhardt chain."

Wockhardt evaluated many solutions before selecting Wipro's. The solutions were tested for suitability in terms of features, product path, future vision, technology, customisation capabilities, and availability of long-term support. Since the existing hospital management systems were not suited to function in the new growth-oriented environment, they needed to be replaced.

Wockhardt, in collaboration with Harvard Medical International, chose Wipro HealthCare IT-a part of Wipro Technologies-as the solution provider for the project. Oracle Financials was selected as the global financial vehicle. The financial gist of local operations is captured from the HIS and posted into Oracle Financials through an interface.

Inside The His

The new system has enabled improved patient care, and we have been able to achieve consistency in this. In terms of cost, the overall manpower per IP bed has reduced The HIS has about 36 integrated modules catering to different functions of the hospital. The modules covered include administrative, commercial, materials, manpower and clinical data. It has interfaces to laboratory equipment, bar-codes of lab samples, attendance recording systems and financial accounting systems. The solution is integrated and configurable, and is thus easily manageable.

About 200 client PCs are networked by a 100 Mbps backbone connected to a powerful set of application and database servers. 60- 100 users can log in at any time.

The database and applications run on a Pentium III 800 MHz server. The solution includes an Internet and Lotus Notes e-mail server. There is an audio-visual set-up for broadcasting live surgeries to auditoriums; this facility can be extended to remote locations by using leased lines, ISDN and the Internet. In addition, there is an intranet set-up which gives access to HR policies and other employee self-services.

The Technology

The presentation layer of the HIS consists of Windows client applications developed using the Microsoft Visual Basic version 6.0 development system. The Data Service layer runs through Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and the HIS database is hosted on a two-node Microsoft SQL server cluster, along with a single-node application server and a single-node staging server. All users connected to the primary server can shift to the secondary application server if the first one fails.

The Practice

The implementation was done jointly by Wipro, Wockhardt-IT and the hospital's power users, and was completed in eight months.

The implementation process is called a milestone-based litmus test, and involves dividing the project into seven milestones. To proceed to the next module of implementation, the previous module enforced has to pass a litmus test as determined by functional users. After the implementation, four-level support is provided. The first level is given by power users of the particular function, next by user co-ordinators, and then by the local IT support team. If all of these fail, the problem is finally submitted to Wipro.

There is a test-bed facility in Mumbai where all cases, solutions and additions to solutions are tested by the IT team before they are released to the production server.

An Effective Solution

The ROI on the HIS has been better than expected. "The new system has enabled improved patient care, and we have been able to achieve consistency in this. Human errors in the functioning of the hospital have reduced considerably. In terms of cost, the overall manpower per IP bed has reduced," states Shenoy. Similarly, better material control has been achieved through the requisition-issue-acknowledgement cycle.

Looking Ahead

The company has extensive plans for implementing projects in future. The implementation of the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) and its integration with HIS has been planned. Other plans include online interface with third parties for medical assurance, integrating tele-medicine with HIS, developing interfaces with handheld devices for delivering faster and better care, and Internet-based delivery of lab and other reports in a secure environment. For A Suitable Solution