At Infosys, our Insurance, Healthcare and Life Sciences teams strive for holistic, better and safer healthcare through the technology we create. In this blog, we will discuss healthcare IT, obstacles, successes, new ideas and much more, with the aim of improving healthcare technology, and quality of life as a result.

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October 27, 2009

Error-Free Data Available! Real Performance Improvements in 90 Days!

Hospitals are run by smart people – very smart people. We instinctively know where there problems are and essentially know how to go about fixing them. But convincing our peers and our managers (or the accountants) is a wholly different experience. Modern administrators’ desire data, admire analysis, and crave consensus. But our attempts are routinely foiled by proprietary clinical systems, disparate data standards, acute data quality problems, and poor data management processes.  Data does exist, but either we can’t get at it or people don’t believe in it.  We agonize over the lack of data to help us improve fairly basic processes: reducing patient waiting times, reducing on-hand inventory, improving compliance, improving patient satisfaction, and providing assurances that people are doing their job. For these and many other process issues, there is a way to solve the data access and data quality problem. Create your own easily accessible, error-free Data!  Please read on.

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October 15, 2009

Interoperability - a platform to enable 21st century care

“Imagine this situation: you go to a supermarket and before you pick up anything from the shelf, the manager needs to call your bank to find out if you are eligible to buy it. Then when you reach the checkout counter, your bank has to confirm if they will allow the charge on the credit card or if you need to pay cash for a particular item and ask the supermarket to raise a invoice to them against your purchase! Imagine the number of people who would be involved in calling up the bank, responding to the questions at the bank and working on preparing the paperwork for the invoice and then adjusting it against their system. Now that you have visualized it, try to also imagine the costs involved around the same and how much you are paying for that box cereals actually went into making that box and bringing it to you at the store.

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August 13, 2009

Enterprise Performance Management for Healthcare – Really!

It is simply amazing, how things change within a short span of time, in an industry that is traditionally considered highly static. Take the example of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).

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August 03, 2009

Enterprise Data analytics: Breaking department silos

Organization departments have tendency work in silos and Healthcare Providers are no exception to this.  A leading insurance provider firm in USA was venturing into a new business in Canada and the IT team was busy working on the system requirements for the new business. The CIO sought this opportunity to make maximum out of the capital budget to invest in latest rules engine and custom application development. There was no consideration given to the revenue targets onto this new business or ROI on the IT system investment. Out of curiosity when I asked the CIO, his response was “ROI clouds the mind in any decision making. My priority is to ensure work for my team and have the systems in place to support business. It’s for business SMEs to extract maximum out of the system. This is what I call working in silos of departments by achieving individual department goals.

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May 22, 2009

What bare minimum features should a Hospital BI tool provide?

Hospital executives must perform the complex task of keeping pace with the dynamic healthcare environment – constantly changing patient volumes, fluctuating supply costs, stringent government compliance and quality requirements, asset utilization needs, and staffing shortages. Real time actionable information at finger tips can make a difference between life and death in a Hospital scenario. The disparate silos of data across various departments are the biggest bottleneck in providing actionable information. Mergers and acquisitions add to the diversity of hospital information system (HIS) application and data sources, thereby not allowing ‘one version of truth’.

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