Sanjay Kumar Jain, Director, Akhil Systems

The market will evolve tremendously in upcoming years as healthcare providers are increasingly adopting corporate culture, which is fuelling demand for IT solutions in the healthcare industry, says Sanjay Kumar Jain, Director, Akhil Systems

What is your view on Healthcare IT market in India vis-à-vis the global market? And how do you see the market evolving in next five years?

Indian healthcare IT market is evolving at a very fast pace compared to global market. Using an integrated, holistic approach, which allows the healthcare organisations to remain flexible to the compliance and developments, has necessitated the requirement of information systems in healthcare sectors over the years. With more number of organisations moving towards better equipped healthcare institutes, technological advancements become an imperative need for such healthcare organisations in order to meet the increasing demand of the population. Our Miracle His provides an integrated solution with flexibility as per demand of the healthcare IT market worldwide.

In next five years we can foresee the new technological advancement including mobile applications, electronic medical record (EMR), telemedicine, Cloud based systems etc. will become more in demands. The demand for advanced analytics tools will also be one of the key trends in the market. We expect the market will evolve tremendously in upcoming years as healthcare providers and institutions are increasingly adopting corporate culture, which isfuelling demand for IT solutions in the healthcare industry.

What according to you are the emerging trends in this particular sector and how do you see the Indian healthcare market’s indulgence in adopting IT in healthcare?

Web based Hospital Information System (HIS) is of the latest emerging solutions to manage hospital operations. It can be hosted on cloud. The benefit of web based HIS is that it allows the application to run on multiple servers and at various locations suitable for chains of hospitals, clinics, diagnostic centres and pharmacy chains. Currently in India the main focus of hospitals shifted to the web based solutions as it provides ease of access and other technical advantages as well.

Electronic medical record has received more attention than any other over the past several years. Nowadays in India demand of EMR is increasing rapidly. Various renowned hospitals like Aster Medcity (Cochin), Shanti hospital (Bangalore), BLK Hospital (Delhi), etc. are using EHR developed by Akhil Systems and we handle enquires almost every day.

Over the past several years, the omnipresence of smartphones, t a b l e t s and their applications has been one of the biggest cultural shifts in thehospital setting, as well as society at large. Doctors nowadays preferring tablets for maintaining their patient records, it’s also being used for surgeries. Akhil Systems developed Miracle EMR mobile application recently for doctor’s use.

Patient Portals is an online tool for patients is also one of the latest technologies now available in market. Through this patient can get online test results, access theirclinical records, send appointment request etc. Akhil Systems is also providing Miracle patient portal.

Through ‘Make in India’ initiative we can look forward for making quality and robust solution with cost effectiveness, which is a major concern. Also, especially through ‘Digital India’ initiative we can penetrate to tier II and tier III cities and rural areas as well with our web based/ cloud solutions

What is driving the Indian healthcare IT market?

There are several factors driving the Indian healthcare IT market:

• Lowest market penetration in tier II and tier III cities, which covers a huge market in India. These markets are untapped due to low spending in IT infrastructure. But, now they are getting aware of the use and importance of IT, which is going to be a driving factor

• Awareness of standardisation is also driving the market as hospitals are going for standard accreditations like NABH, NABL, JCI etc. The IT solutions make this task easy and accurate

• Overall Indian healthcare industry is growing at fast pace and various new hospitals and healthcare institutes coming up in a big way. This increases the demand as most of the new hospitals go for the IT solutions to provide better care and stand upto the competition

• Healthcare insurance market in India is growing like never before. As insurance penetrates the marketplace, there will be a financial motivation to collect all the data and mine it to create practice guidelines and achieve excellence

• Corporatisation of hospitals is also a driving factor to adapt healthcare IT solutions

• As India is one of the top medicaltourism destination, hospitals looking for quality healthcare and robust IT solutions to provide best care to foreign patients

How do you see the ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’ contributing to the growth of Healthcare IT industry?

These initiatives are going to have huge impact on healthcare IT industry. There are numerous opportunities, in which foreign investor can invest. Through ‘Make in India’ initiative we can look forward for making quality and robust solution with cost effectiveness, which is a major concern. Also, especially through ‘Digital India’ initiative we can penetrate to tier II and tier III cities and rural areas as well with our web based/ cloud solutions.

What are the challenges presently faced by the Healthcare IT industry?

The healthcare industry in India has various challenges due to inadequate infrastructure and a constrained healthcare delivery work process,which intensify the complexity.

Some of the key challenges in integrating IT into the Indian healthcare system include:

• Lack of standards in healthcare IT due to varied functionality requirements in hospital to hospital
• Lack of in-house IT domain knowledge
• Integration and cost effectiveness
• Reluctance of medical, nursing and other staff to adjust to change
• More reliability on paper based systems
• Lack of proper vendor support

We have faced almost all of the above challenges in past two decades and we have tackled these challenges in very effective manner. For example we know there is lack of standardisation in healthcare IT but through our 20 years of experience we have almost included all the technical and functional requirements learning from the hospitals (especially in India) itself and above all our solution is so flexible that we can provide customisation as much as possible as per hospital requirement.

What are your present operations in India and expansion plans?

For the past two decades we are working on single domain of healthcare only. Our headquarter is in New Delhi and we have presence of our HIS in18 states, 38 cities and covered almost all major metropolitan cities. We are planning to open offices in Mumbai, Kolkata and Bangalore soon. We have recently launched Akhil Health World a health portal for all which is our first business to consumer project. Apart from that we have presence in six countries including US, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Bahrain. We are also planning for expansion in international market as well.

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