Revamped info system revives Delhi hospital

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Healthcare IT

By Jianggan Li | 14 April 2010

Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in Delhi has gone on a journey of computerisation for more than two decades. An in-house system was built in the beginning. But it became “terribly dated”, prompting the hospital to adopt a commercially available package Health Information System.

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Implementation took almost four years. But the benefits have been worth the effort. “We are recovering the entire cost of the project every 15 to 30 days,” says Dr Karanvir Singh, the hospital’s Head of Medical Informatics. “That is in addition to the improvements to the quality of care, which are hard to measure.”

Dr Singh shared these comments with FutureGov during a recent interview in his office at the hospital in central Delhi. He says that many hospitals are still computerising “for the sake of computerisation”. There has to be a reason to go paperless, he says, You have to know why you are going paperless, “otherwise there will no real value beyond some good PR,” he says.

Proper planning and governance need to be in place. “It is important to capture your data as granularly as possible, so that you can analyse the data later,” he says. “This is something that the hospital has to keep in mind during the initial planning stage.”

“Once you have started the project, it becomes very difficult for you to change,” he adds. As with many other hospitals, Sir Ganga Ram has had to deal with physician resistance to new systems. “The business intelligence tool we built on top of the HIS really helped,” he says. “Seeing the benefits, doctors now come to IT and ask for the data.”

Sir Ganga Ram hospital now has data analysis in real-time – any event which has happened will be reflected when a user uses the analysis tool a few seconds later. “Once they realise the benefits that instant analysis could bring them, they like to use the system.”

A push from the management level also helps. “If management doesn’t push, users will not use the system before they get the chance to get comfortable with it,” he says. “And failure will almost certainly be blamed on the implementation team.”

Developing and implementing an information system within the hospital requires consultation with different departments. Dr Singh notices that in many places such consultations are not taken seriously enough by other departments. This can ultimately lead to efficiencies and inaccuracies in the system design and implementation.

“You can’t rely solely on the implementation team to make the project a success,” he says. “Each department needs to put in a lot of effort, and make sure that their best people are involved in the process to provide the necessary input.”

“We are still evolving,” Dr Singh concludes. “We can’t sit back after implementation and wait for the system to become outdated in a few years’ time.”

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1 Comments

On 28 April 2010 Health Information wrote:

Health Information System and proper use of ICT can help a lot in terms of saving time, money and energy…. even patient education can be implemented to educate the patient and family and spread awareness.