Sachin Chougule
Co-founder and
Director DesignTech
Systems Ltd

Sachin Chougule, Co-founder and Director, DesignTech Systems Ltd., talks toJapneet Sabharwal, ENN, highlighting the need of applications to throw up lot ofinformation to caregivers

How do you perceive the market for HIS & HMIS in India?
The overall investments in the Healthcare sector are growing by more than 15 percent/annum as compared to investments in Healthcare IT products which are currently less than 10 percent/ annum.
The major drivers for growth for healthcare IT product usage are as follows:
Current market size as per Gartner Group report in to the tune of `5000 crores and is growing at the rate of 7 percent/annum.
Rising awareness and demand for higher level of healthcare need use or EMR.
The requirement of cashless payments or insurance and speedy settlements of claims need IT enablement.
Increase in medical tourism is making hospitals invest in state of art IT setup to attract patients from abroad.

What are the unique HIS/HMIS solutions you have designed for Indian healthcare?
DesignTech Systems offer four different products for the following market segments. Asclepius Clinic for clinics and practitioners, Asclepius Lite or Professional for small or medium size hospitals and Asclepius Enterprise for large hospitals. Our ERP caters for Patient Management, Billing, LIS, RIS and Inventory Management and seamlessly integrates all the allied services of the hospital.
The unique and The Next Big Thing concept of Workflow Management Framework enable hospitals to reduce overall time to process transactions. Building applications that are user-friendly are a passé. The need today is to build the HIS applications that will enable caregivers to deliver services in the nick of time. One of the major grievances coming from patients is wait time and time spent in queues.
Applications with Workflow Management Systems can significantly reduce the wait time. Workflows give caregivers advance information about the service and care due to the patient, and enable them to prepare in advance. Work orders provide information to respective departments and caregivers through workflows.
We have already seen hospitals managing more number of patients in lesser OPD time as compared to while user earlier versions of HIS solutions.

On the technology front, what are the new developments that have come up in this field?
As mentioned above we have invested in building our application on the .NET Workflow Foundation. Work orders based on workflows allow applications to speed up services in various departments in the hospital.
The other most crucial aspect is to make information available real time. This is pushing vendors to make the application portable on the cloud. Having the application hosted on a cloud will enable pushing data on various types of devices such as mobiles, tablets etc.

How much investment is required for procuring HIS/ HMIS solution for a hospital infrastructure?
Like other industries such as automobiles, manufacturing, tourism etc, hospitals need to budget out a certain percentage of their turnover for IT spend. The IT spend should include capital expenditure, infrastructure, hardware and software, running costs in terms of annual subscriptions etc. and personnel. Hospitals must plan and fix the IT budget on priority. IT budget spend can be recovered in less than 18 months, in many cases.

What are the advantages the solution offers to the hospital caregivers?
As we have started stressing that it is not important to make the application user friendly but it is important the application can speed up things for the patients. Applications must enable caregivers to attend to patientswithout making them wait at all. Work orders processed by workflow management give caregivers advance information about the patient and the services to be provided to them. Applications need to throw up lot of information to caregivers. Applications must be able to refresh this information and make it presentable to users at all time, whether as pop ups, live lists and drag and drop.

With over decades of exposure and experience in healthcare, how do you visualize and uate the IT transformation?
IT transformation is fast paced phenomena in India too. India also has a foot print of the west. Indian hospitals have invested in multiple applications to address multiple needs of the organization. Hospitals have made investments in HIS, LIS, RIS, EMR etc. Each of them bring value addition to the organization. The challenge is integrating all such systems, and make the data inter portable and seamlessly available to the user.
Healthcare data can be huge and complex, and at the same time is always changing. Data is also sensitive and must be protected for manipulation, make need for state of art storage solutions. IT illiteracy and lack of awareness often act as initial obstacles for health IT players.

Our ERP caters for Patient Management, Billing, LIS, RIS and Inventory Management and seamlessly integrates all the allied services of the hospital

Did you face similar challenges?
Yes, but only sometimes. The major challenge is lack of common processes. Hospitals often force vendors tochange the application to meet their requirements. The seriousness to accept IT as a real differentiating and enabling tool, willingness to invest in it and leveraging as competitive advantage is generally lacking in the top management/ owners of our healthcare organizations. Compare this with the services and manufacturing industry of the mid 90s when IT use was restricted to mainly EDP functionality which today has changed to the strategic CIO role making them globally competitive. With international medical tourism opportunities, globalization and increasing regulatory pressure healthcare organizations will also have to accept strategic role of IT tools soon.

Security is an integral aspect of Health IT Infrastructure. However, a majority of healthcare organisations havent yet woken up to its significance. Whats your take on this?
Security of data is vital, and especially when it comes to clinical data. As mentioned earlier data in healthcare is exchanged from one system to another and hence need to be secured at all time. Unlike the West, India lacks laws and proper regulations in this regard.
US and many other countries have laws that bind on hospitals and HIS vendors to safeguard clinical and patient data. Security is not only a part of software, but also hardware and networking systems. A proper security system is built from the combination of all the above.

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