How a simple app helped Manipal Hospitals achieve 40% operational efficiencies

The healthcare group is taking several steps towards a paperless hospital

NANDKISHOR DHOMNE

MANIPAL HEALTH ENTERPRISES

If you drive the digital transformation initiatives as IT projects, there is greater risk of such projects facing deployment and / or adoption hurdles going forward. Hence, it is essential that right from the beginning (conception phase) till implementation and adoption, active involvement and accountability of the respective stakeholders is ensured for a smooth implementation and transitioning.

Manipal Hospitals, one of the most technologically advanced hospitals in Asia, is going a step further and making its operations more seamless. One of the projects recently undertaken by Manipal Hospitals is Build Manipal Way (BMW) project that helps drive smooth operations as it provides a platform to the business heads to manage day-to-day operations, planning preventive and corrective measures to ensure smooth business processes.

“This is a live dashboard system showing the real time actionable information for seven departments including operations, financials, quality, HR and project. This helps the management and business heads to make timely decisions based on data. Therefore, the chances of errors in decision-making are minimised to a major extent. Also, the dashboards are useful to assess the business growth and challenges and ensure timely actions and steps to avoid negative impact on the business,” explains Nandkishor Dhomne, CIO, Manipal Group.

Manipal Hospitals has already won many accolades for the deployment of IBM Watson for Oncology which it is using to fight cancer. However, a simple but potent application developed by the hospital is improving things faster. It is the Porter Management System — an RFID-based solution for tracking Porter's location and status within the hospital premises. Porter Management System helped the organisation improve its operational efficiency by 40-45 per cent, Process Turnaround time (TAT) was reduced by 40 per cent and about 80 nursing hours are being saved per day. The project helped in headcount reduction of around 20 per cent,” explains Dhomne.

Manipal Hospitals achieved success as any technology initiative for solving given business problem is not considered as an IT initiative at the group. Instead, it is considered as a business initiative and such initiatives are driven by a joint team ie IT and functional owners. “Formation of a cross-functional team is an integral part of any technology deployment at Manipal Hospitals. Key process-owners are a part of solution evaluations and decision-making as to what solution will fit the given situation to meet the business challenges. This helps in getting the users buy in and makes respective stakeholders accountable for smooth implementation and adoption,” shares Dhomne.

In addition to the functional team, Manipal Hospitals has a steering committee comprising head of departments who are the direct stakeholders and use the given solutions. This committee oversees the overall initiatives and reviews the progress from time-to-time. “In a nutshell,

The hospital group keeps upgrading its infrastructure on a periodic basis. Typical technology refresh cycle for the group is five years which eliminates any legacy related challenges. “Whenever we procure the infrastructure, we ensure it is not end of the life product and is scalable for a minimum period of five years. Most of our infrastructure is based on the recent 'converged platform' model which is modular and highly scalable and we can keep on adding the capacities over the next five to six years as business demands,” he explains.

For Dhomne, these projects are routine with a much larger digital transformation mission in store for future. “Our long-term digital transformation goal is to have a digital paperless hospital to develop ecosystem integration (suppliers, TPAs/ insurance companies) to have fully empowered patients using mobility and other technologies and finally to create data-driven culture using analytics/ dashboards,” Dhomne concludes.