Digitization Archives - InnoHEALTH magazine

AI and Cybersecurity in Digital Healthcare

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 09:07:46 +0000

All day all round we keep hearing the buzzwords such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), deep learning cybersecurity, etc. But do we really know what these are? Should we really be bothered and aware of how these can change the healthcare industry? To answer and brainstorm on such questions, the InnovatioCuris team gathered on a beautiful Saturday morning on 6 April 2019 in one of India & premier institutions in Hospital and Health Management, Indian Institute of Health Management Research (IIHMR), Delhi.

The meeting witnessed some very eminent and influential speakers from around the healthcare sector. The former Enforcement Director (ED) Karnal Singh who has investigated many high- profile cases graced the meeting as the Chief Guest.

Innovation is exciting and there are more innovations happening in the private sector, and with increasing technology come increased risks. With the rapidly growing technology, ranging from wireless devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and laptops to smart refrigerators, cars, and even medical devices like pacemakers, etc., it seems that the growing connections around us are difficult to detect. Therefore, the risk that comes together in operating within this brave, new and a connected world is high.

Shri Karnal Singh shared his expert viewpoint on the impact and importance of artificial intelligence, connected healthcare and need for cybersecurity in healthcare. How the digitization of healthcare is important and the rural and urban divide of same. He also insisted on the improvement of infrastructure and facilities available in the rural healthcare industry. In addition, he discussed the gap between the medical industry and government institutions where the research is needed and that we adopt mostly from our partnering and supporting foreign countries and how a change in mindset and adoption of new and improved technology can enhance the Indian healthcare. The future of healthcare is on the Internet and the Internet is vulnerable. Technology is the solution and it will come whether we want it or not. Therefore, the need of the hour is OUR PREPAREDNESS. We should welcome and be prepared for the connected network of healthcare.

An interesting session on the basic concepts of AI was the icing on the cake. It acquainted the participants with AI emphasizing on the fact that one should not get bogged down by the technology. Instead, one should focus on the use cases of it and there lies the innovation.

Often, the terms “digital health” evoke images of smartwatches or apps that can process the health data and can give a readout of parameters like heart rate, blood pressure, etc. That is a part of digital health, to be sure, but today we also focus on a newer aspect called “Precision Health” and the session “Prerequisite and journey of India to offer (precision) healthcare to all: Powered by Digital, Genetics, and AI” offered a far more expansive vision for digital health technologies, genetics and AI.

Precision medicine is an emerging approach of medicine which focuses on the cause of an illness, and not addressing the symptoms alone. Precision medicine may not be very well- known as Personalized Medicine. But they are the same. It takes into consideration individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person.

Precision healthcare improves efficiency and accuracy to healthcare treatments. With precision healthcare, doctors can potentially develop targeted and precise treatment and therapies for masses as well as for an individual. This can improve patient treatment to large populations in countries like ours.

It’s based on evidence and data which comes from a series of medical tests on a patient. Thus, the data is its most important aspect. Very soon, along with genome sequencing and health sensors data coupled with the growing amount of Big Data, patient data will create large data sets of valuable information which can be used for more tailored treatments. But as an individual, a physician is not equipped to manually analyze these newly available data sets, which is where the advanced technologies such as AI come into picture.

The challenge that the clinicians see in the adoption of AI is the gap between the technical person and a clinician in regard to understanding the implementation of “normal reference values”. For example: If the normal value of hemoglobin for a person staying at planes (say Delhi NCR) is 13.5, the value 17.5 is perfectly normal at Ladakh. Is that incorporated in the AI system? Something that works in the USA might not work in India. The doctor or a clinician will have a great role to play in case of developing the AI as he/she can only give the correct inputs for the training sets.

With the new wave of digitization, medical records have seen a paradigm shift in the healthcare industry. As a result, the healthcare industry is witnessing an increase in the absolute volume of data in terms of complexity, diversity, and timeliness. Since the healthcare experts look for every possible way to lower the costs while improving the care process, delivery and management, and so is the aim of InnovatioCuris (IC), big data emerges as a persuasive solution with a promise to transform the healthcare industry. This paradigm shift from reactive to proactive healthcare may result in an overall reduction in healthcare costs and gradually may lead to economic growth. The above-stated and many more discussion points were there that became the part of the very interactive and interesting second session on “Mitigating data security and privacy challenges for digital healthcare in India”.

Data transmission is also an important aspect of implementing technology and safeguarding it. The Digital Information Security in Healthcare Act (DISHA) is one such step taken by the Indian Government in the long journey to securing the healthcare data of patients in India.

One of the biggest challenges is the lack of availability of data in a democratic manner and it’s all in silos in short data interoperability is a huge challenge. The major concerns that the clinicians have at the moment regarding the implementation of DISHA act are that it says that no court shall entertain any complaint unless made by the Central Government or central data authority, state data authority or the person affected and there would be times when PIL (public interest litigation) is there on the data security as well. The challenges will always pertain but what we need to do is to have trust in the law and protection by it. Major challenges regarding data security or cybersecurity, in hospitals or the clinical establishments, is that we do not have implemented laws that may protect our data. With the hope that they are definitely going to come, we can only stay prepared with our changed mindsets.

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Healthcare IT market builds the foundation of Artificial Intelligence

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 11:09:41 +0000

Healthcare IT market builds the foundation of Artificial Intelligence-based Healthcare System and creates lucrative Job Opportunities.

New Job opportunities, the reduced communication gap between a patient and a doctor, the artificial intelligence-based healthcare system, and the digitization has surely created an amazing era of healthcare IT.

Evaluation–Diagnosis–Treatment. This is the traditional and generally accepted method of a medical procedure. However, the healthcare sector has evolved over the last couple of years. Today’s healthcare is using a new, digital companion to determine how patients feel based on much more than their present medical condition. Healthcare information technology or healthcare IT is widely used by doctors, surgeons, and pharmacists to understand the medical information of patients and improve communication between doctors and patients.

What is the use of Healthcare IT?

The major advantage of the healthcare IT is that it reduces the communication gap between a patient and a doctor as the healthcare IT collects and converts the patient’s information from paper records and medical charts to electronic data. This migration provides direct access to patient’s information to doctors irrespective of their location and enables to share knowledge with other doctors than the current medication providers. Moreover, the doctor-recommended prescriptions can be transmitted electronically owing to the healthcare IT, which has improved efficiency and reduced the valuable time.

Healthcare IT is much more than just an electronic version of paper medical records. It includes previous maintained medical images by radiology departments and opinions of specialists on a certain method of treatment. In addition, the digital messages including emails, healthcare tips, chat logs, the day-to-day medical progress of a patient, and financial factors such as scheduling and billing fall under the sky of healthcare IT. However, these records must be stored and maintained carefully to prevent invasion of privacy. On the other hand, technological advancements and easily accessible facilities fuel the demand for healthcare IT. Roughly, two-thirds Americans have instant access to the internet, which eliminates a patient’s restrictions with medical consultants. The tech giants such as Microsoft, Apple, and other new start-ups are developing up-to-the-minute opportunities in the healthcare IT market by improving access to digital applications and providing efficient security features. This has increased demand for healthcare IT services, boosting the growth of the healthcare information technology market. According to a report published by Allied Market Research, the market is expected to register a CAGR of 13.2 % in the period 2014–2022.

Healthcare generates job opportunities

The growth of healthcare IT has created a surge in job opportunities in the IT sector. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, by the end of 2024, the need for healthcare and medical managers will boost by about 17 percent. The healthcare IT management jobs oversee the entire system process and its day-to-day operations. Healthcare providers are finding hard to pick employees for job positions such as development, analytics, coding, and research. Moreover, just the collection of healthcare data is not enough. Once that data is received, it needs to be analyzed by skilled professionals and constantly updated and improved. Therefore, coding experts are extremely essential to smoothly transfer the individual records of patients to a central hub, by changing the codes that could otherwise interrupt the transfer of information. It is estimated that the requirement of such new codes is nearly 130,000. Moreover, the IT specialists assist healthcare service providers to obey the federal guidelines for records, a collection of data and share to protect a patient’s privacy. Due to such requirements, there are ample IT companies and even start-ups that are launching new platforms to develop a sustainable healthcare IT department.

Recently, Javara Inc., a clinical research service organization, launched a platform that is focused on compelling innovative research partnerships, service, and technology to healthcare systems. Jennifer Byrne, the co-founder, and CEO of Javara stated that the new healthcare IT platform will bring better outcomes for patient-centered care, better economic results, and easier research delivery model to the biopharmaceutical sector.

Integration of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare IT

It is no secret that the healthcare sector holds a humongous amount of data; if incorporated with artificial intelligence (AI), it will open innumerable opportunities in the future. Microsoft, one of the largest information technology companies, has been working on several healthcare-related projects. Recently, Microsoft made clear its exact intentions behind developing a Microsoft healthcare team. The company aims to create a cloud-based patients’ profile, push doctors to use more cloud-based services, and eventually develop an AI to analyze the huge data. Microsoft hired two industry past masters: Jim Weinstein and Joshua Mandel to help achieve this goal. Jim Weinstein, the former CEO of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System, will help the migration of healthcare data to the cloud. Joshua Mandel, ex-Google employee, will assist in building open cloud architecture for all healthcare service providers.

The prime motive behind the project is to find a way to shift healthcare data to the cloud without jeopardizing its confidentiality. This new team will be a part of Microsoft’s AI research division. Peter Lee, the head of Microsoft healthcare, explained, at Microsoft, we’re confident that many aspects of the IT foundations for healthcare will move from on-premise doctors’ offices and clinics to live in the cloud. We are taking concrete steps with an initial blueprint intended to standardize the process for the complaint, privacy-preserving movement of a patient’s personal health information to the cloud and the automated tracking of its exposure to machine learning and data science. The company wants to pave the way to create an open architecture that eventually helps doctors, nurses and healthcare service providers, and to allow more time for patients to spend face-to-face with the doctors. The new platform will open new opportunities for healthcare data to be shared and to protect its privacy. Such innovative projects and huge investments in healthcare AI proves that the incorporation of AI in healthcare IT will be a fruitful investment for the healthcare providers, and no doubt it will be a key to the bright future of healthcare sector.

About the author

Nikhil Bhusare is an Executive with Allied Market Research.

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Cyber-Biosecurity: Are we ready?

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 08:42:50 +0000

Bertrand Russell once said, ‘War doesn’t determine who is right−only who is left”, thus ‘we need to update, upgrade and be prepared for our own survival’. These words sound more relevant in the contemporary phase in the wake of fast changing global scenario and emerging inevitability for updating virtually by spilled of seconds.

Amalgamation of biotechnological and information technology advancement in the 21st century has altered our world at the fundamental level which is evident in the area of health, manufacturing, and food security. Humankind has also witnessed malicious bugs like Y2K and Wanna cry in biological and cyber field respectively. We have reached new landmarks on our understanding of how biological systems work and also discovered ways to meaningfully manipulate these systems as per our advantage/ requirement. Biotech tools, such as gene drives, can deliberately engineer inheritable genetic traits into wild populations, offering a powerful new way to escape from certain vector-borne diseases.

Gene editing tools such as CRISPR-CAS9 (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats associated protein-9 nuclease) are being used globally for quick and precise gene editing. Researchers like to use computers to analyze DNA, operate lab machines and store genetic information. In the health sector, the digitization of biology & metabolic engineering accelerated the development of new vaccines, drugs, and painkillers. Agriculture is becoming smarter/digitized, with farmers relying on data-driven decision acquired through sensors planted in the ground, satellites guiding tractor movements and other new practices. But these emerging capabilities come with a whole new category of vulnerabilities and risks.

Also Read: IIT Kanpur Braces Up to Prevent Cyber Attacks

Over the last five years “technological barriers to acquire and use biological weapon has been significantly eroded.” The security impact of biotech advances goes beyond bioweapon. For example, developments in metabolic pathway engineering also offer opportunities to produce illegal drugs such as heroin. Scientists have already identified how to make the active compounds in other narcotics, such as for cannabis and precursors of LSD. What if a terrorist group or a despotic regime tries to spread modified organisms aimed at striking troops, frightening civilians, or putting food production in disarray? The failed attempt of Japanese cult to obtain Ebola strains from South Africa is one such indicator.

Recently Jean and coworkers (2018) highlighted the risks of using gene sequencing technologies to corrupt the databases by altering sequences or annotations. In this article, computer scientists designed a DNA sample that when sequenced, resulted in a data file which enabled the hacker to control the sequencing computer remotely and gave access to the hacker to make changes in DNA sequences. These alterations could delay a research program causing capital, labor loss or can be used in act of terrorism for uncontrolled production of toxins or infectious agents. To mitigate these risks, the culture of the life sciences community needs to shift from trusting blindly to a highly aware and trained community. This also requires intricate relationships between the computational and experimental dimensions of product development workflows.

The diverse nature of pathogens and toxins with their potential to be used as a biowarfare agent (BW) could be attributed to multiple factors. These include infectivity (the number of organisms required to cause disease), virulence (the severity of the disease caused), transmissibility (ease of spreading from person to person), and incubation period (the time from exposure of a biological agent to the onset of illness). All these attributes are manageable by modern biotechnology and information related to such experimentation trials is key to any covert attack using these for BW.

Similarly, in the cyber world, there is a diversity of malicious codes. These include viruses (programs that replicate in target machinery); worms (self-sustaining programs) and carriers such as a trojan horse to perform a legitimate function with malicious activity. Additionally, Botnets, or networks of computers infected with malicious code, can be coordinated to perform distributed denial of service attacks. For biological weapons, delivery vehicles range from advanced aerial spray technology to contamination of food products or water, while malicious code in cyberspace can be delivered by usage portals, email, web browsers, chat clients, web-enabled applications, and updates. The cyber threat has expanded dramatically in recent years with a series of damage. Terrorists are using cyber capabilities over traditional methods to target 104 countries including India.

Also Read: Time To Take Some Intelligent Decisions

Governments and security experts have singled out the life sciences sector as being significantly vulnerable to cybercrime. In cybersecurity terms, innovation is fast 50 Volume 3 | Issue 3 | July-September 2018 becoming a double-edged sword for life sciences clients. Recently FireEye disclosed the threat posed by two Advance Persistent Threat (APT) groups which gained access to the environment of a leading pharmaceutical company for up to three years prior to detection. They stole IP and business data from the victim, information on bio cultures, products, cost reports, and other details pertaining to the company’s operations abroad. There is nothing more important to a pharmaceutical organization than the formula for one of its new drugs.

For cyber biosecurity, employee training should be given priority. It can greatly increase an organization’s general awareness of these new risks. Similar to biosafety training, cybersecurity training modules and policies should be introduced. Secondly, organizations should perform a thorough analysis of its exposure to cyber biosecurity risks not covered by existing biosafety and biosecurity policies.

Training exercises based on this type of analysis will encourage participants to review their workflows and identify their vulnerabilities. It is high time now to evolve a policy framework to detect and prevent security threats that may compromise life sciences assets. It includes guidelines on synthetic DNA targeted companies that provide DNA synthesis services to monitor research focus and relates features.

Bioinformatics software is still not hardened against attack. Encouragement of widespread adoption of standard software best security practices like input sanitization, the use of memory safe languages or bounds checking at buffers, and regular security audits is necessary. Patching still remains challenging as the analysis software are often located in individually managed repositories and not regularly updated. One solution is to use a centralized repository to manage updates and deliver patches, similar to the APT package manager.

These could also be signed to ensure their authenticity. In the case of file sharing, the sequencing files themselves could be signed by verified research groups before uploading them to centralized databases. This is just the glimpse of the long list of strategies that need immediate deployment, continuous review, and improvement with time.

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The future of healthcare

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 07:35:04 +0000

Digital Health: Giving Birth to New Delivery Models and Fostering Innovations

Imagine a world where patient information is accurate, accessible, reliable, and safe. The opportunities and benefits are endless: availability, accuracy, portability and privacy of patient information, confidence on the information in an emergency, ease in searching and finding patterns, medical and post ops management with proactive reminders influencing patient behavior, and minimizing insurance and substance abuse. In recent times, we have seen tremendous progress in the evolution of cloud technology. Cloud enables easy access to shared configurable technology resources that can be utilized to rapidly create and deploy new services.

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Followings are the some of the key challenges that remain to improve healthcare:
• Investment – Compared to the other countries, very small % of Indian GDP is spent on developing healthcare which is about 100 times less than the United States.
• Geography – A wide gap remains between rural and urban healthcare. Most of our healthcare resources are concentrated in big cities leaving the rural areas with no or almost no resources to meet the growing healthcare need.
• Infrastructure – The number of hospitals and health centers in India are far less than what is required. Except for a few super specialty hospitals, most of the hospitals and health centers in India do not have proper infrastructure to provide quality services.

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It makes sense then that in India where there is always a huge gap between demand and availability of quality healthcare that cloud technology can play a huge role. Cloud based technology solutions can be leveraged to provide efficient and high-quality services in healthcare at an affordable price for remote locations with little to no infrastructure. With the advancement of technology, cloud is becoming more and more secured and compliant with regulations. Adopting cloud based technology solutions will all organizations engaged in healthcare to focus more on their core activities and reduce utilization of resources that manage technology.

Key research tells us that with digitization of medical data, medical knowledge has increased by 2 times or more in past 3 to 5 years. The way cloud is being adopted more and more by the industry globally and with the growing need for collaboration, flexibility and improved patient care, we can say that cloud will eventually become a commonplace in the industry.

As seen in countries that have developed healthcare systems, these capabilities were key in the development of healthcare to a point where no avenue is left unexplored in the strive towards improvement of healthcare for its citizens.

While the road to these advances may have been littered with challenges, impediments, false starts and hurdles, technologies today and the lessons learned therein will allow developing nations to avoid such pitfalls and leapfrog their healthcare eco-system into the future!

(Contributors: Kausik Bhattacharya, Johnson & Johnson, Sandipan Gangopadhyay, President and COO, Galaxe Solutions. Dheeraj Misra and Anusha Panduga also from Galaxe Solutions.)

Want to write for InnoHEALTH? send us your article at magazine@innovatiocuris.com

Read all the issues of InnoHEALTH magazine:
InnoHEALTH Volume 1 Issue 1 (July to September 2016) – https://goo.gl/iWAwN2
InnoHEALTH Volume 1 Issue 2 (October to December 2016) – https://goo.gl/4GGMJz
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 1 (January to March 2017) – https://goo.gl/DEyKnw
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 2 (April to June 2017) – https://goo.gl/Nv3eev
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 3 (July to September 2017) – https://goo.gl/MCVjd6
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 4 (October to December 2017) – http://amzn.to/2B2UMLw
InnoHEALTH Volume 3 Issue 1 (January to March 2018) – https://goo.gl/fksdQx
InnoHEALTH Volume 3 Issue 2 (April to June 2018) – https://goo.gl/grbtRo

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Challenges and redefining healthcare landscape

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 10:27:29 +0000

Challenges and Redefining Healthcare Landscape

Keynote Address: R. Rengarajan Iyengar
Moderator: Sachin Gaur
Panelists:
• Anjali Kaushik
• Dr. Sanjay Sharma
• Dr. Nimmi Rastogi
• Amit Bhatnagar
• Deepak Mittal

As India evolves from four-cosmo cities to a vast population coming under the modern cities the healthcare landscape evolves tremendously – discuss high profile panelists at the last session of the InnoHEALTH 2017

Opening the discussion, R. Rengarajan Iyengar of HCL Healthcare started very strongly saying, “The need of the hour is to get the authority of the public sector married with the energy and efficiency of the private sector. With changes in the demographics of the country, health care sector is growing into a very profitable sector as more and more cities are emerging as modern cities and expect only the very best in health and medical facilities.”

In support of his belief, he emphasized, “To achieve the above goals, we need to turn to innovative approach of things that may include new technology, newer processes and modern approach to processing and delivery of the best of the facilities. Concepts like telemedicine and cloud computing are also encouraging new players to enter as investors and at the same time luring corporates to invest in this sector.”

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Sachin Gaur, took over as the moderator of the session and brought in his international exposure sharing his experience in the Scandinavian countries and opened the discussion with his view: “New Age requires New Solutions.”

Starting with Dr. Anjali Kaushik, he engaged the panelists with their thoughts on the subject.

“When you are handling large data sets, and that too, sensitive data like the details of patients, their illness; their personal details and their current medical status – there’s always a threat of cyber attack and we have recently seen in the case of UK’s NHS site being hacked and data was compromised. India is no exception to this as many hospitals have been subject to hacking leading to a freeze in the system where doctors could not treat patients without any access to their vital information. For this we have to induce digital hygiene and put systems in place to ensure that our dependency on digital platform doesn’t become a liability to the system,” said Dr Anjali Kaushik.

In contrast to the skeptical approach of Dr. Anjali, Sachin added that, “Hacking of data remains a grave concern for depending on that tool, but that’s only one aspect of it. There are, however, larger benefits of this holistic approach of using digitization with innovative tools. The way forward is for different players to gather their efforts and handle the challenge of collating quality and accurate data with a unified effort,” said Sachin.

“This is what I have witnessed during my trips abroad, especially in the Scandinavian countries where even the government contributes to gather data and process it suitably,” he concluded.

Dr. Sanjay Sharma, from Yostra labs and Vital Sense added, “We have made an effort to innovate in the field of scarcity and help in extending trained hands to help patients recover fast. There are always well-wishers with patients in the hospital, and they are close relatives of the patient who, we realized, can be utilized to help the patients recover fast and contribute to extending health care beyond doctors and medical staff. So, we initiated an innovative approach to train these well-wishers who contribute with total honesty and good intent to learn healthcare basics. The results have been amazing and have in fact contributed to relieving nurses who are over-worked and short staffed.”

Close to Delhi, the latest break through in the healthcare sector is Mohalla Clinics and Dr. Nimmi Rastogi, shared her thoughts on the concept as Health Advisor to the Government of Delhi. “Mohalla Clinic is a nofrills attached basic clinic to provide primary health services to people in the neighborhood. The facility has one doctor and four medical staff including a nurse and a compounder. It’s a prefabricated, air-conditioned facility in less than 100 sq yards with two rooms and basic facilities to store medicines and conduct essential tests.”

Elaborating on the facility, Dr Nimmi added, “The facility extends free facilities – free consultation, free medicines and 110 tests are conducted free of cost for anyone, irrespective if they belong to Delhi or not. Within the first year of its operations we are handling 80-100 patients a day using innovative tools and digital platform.”

Adding human element to innovations, Amit Bhatnagar of Accuster Technologies shared his personal and professional opinion on the subject and said, “When you talk of innovations, it must involve the people and not just development of technology. With such a large number of technically qualified manpower available to us, innovations without involving them are missing the bigger picture. Our journey of innovation is based on the fact that more than 85 crore people do not have access to diagnostic facilities as they live in rural areas. Our objective has been to develop technology that can be rugged enough to reach out to these rural grounds and help provide accurate diagnostics leading to better remedies.”

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Deepak Mittal, concluded the session spelling out the mission of his company that has gone beyond technology and has extended healthcare by clever use of data in relation to the demographics.

“The mission of our company is to prevent and control diseases, improve quality of care and reduce cost of care. With the help of algorithms and artificial intelligence we can map the trends and predict unexpected ailment attacks with respect to the demographics of the region and population,” explained Deepak.

“For this our dependence on data is crucial and I must share that data in the healthcare sector is probably the worst data with no unified parameters on any filter. So the biggest challenge in executing our intentions with honesty and accuracy totally depends on acquiring and collating good quality data,” concluded Deepak.

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“Telemedicine, as a business is a very lucrative platform. The gap between the resources and the users remains very high and in a country like India is not going to be easy to fill that. Telemedicine will be a very reliable option to bridge the gap and that makes it a very viable business option. But, like most business, telemedicine also has challenges that are very unique. Starting with, most start-ups end up replicating what is already there in the market “with improvisations”. What we need is new solutions and not improved solutions. You must think innovatively to innovate things.”

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“It’s a huge problem and its problem that’s been prevalent for as long as the Clinical Trials themselves. But we often ask ourselves, ‘Do we know how big the problem is?’ And in all fairness, we didn’t know how big the problem is. Research Integrity can be questioned if the Clinical Trials have been unfair in the process and there have been papers that have been withdrawn by Canadian authorities that have been involving questionable practices – especially involving clinical trials.”

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“We have learnt until now that human body is an amalgamation of cells, tissues and cells. Now, the human body has emerged as a conglomeration of biochemical process that are scattered around and work in close coordination with each other with the sole purpose of keeping the human body alive. Another baffling reality for me is the Ayurveda that introduces us to the benefits of plants and their properties. After all, trees and plants appeared much before the pharma industry. Plants have been in existence for more than two billion years and our pharma is less than 200 years old.”

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Want to write for InnoHEALTH? send us your article at magazine@innovatiocuris.com

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Real time patient monitoring system

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 08:24:33 +0000

Real time patient monitoring system at a destination healthcare facility

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Dr. Chandy Abraham has extensive experience of working in both clinical as well as academic settings in India and the United Kingdom and is currently Chief Executive Officer, Medical Director. Dr. Chandy is a “lead surveyor” for the “National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare organisations,” the Indian accreditation agency which works for ensuring quality in the healthcare sector.

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Dr. Vinit Raj, Quality Officer, A Certified Healthcare Quality Professional with a Masters in Hospital Administration and over 9 years of experience in healthcare quality. He has successfully completed 8 Joint Commission International surveys for the hospitals in India, Middle East and North America. He has completed a Certificate Program on Patient Safety and Quality from National Association for Health Care Quality & Harvard Medical School USA.

The era of technology and digitization has been a catalyst for all the improvements in the healthcare industry. It has bridged the communication gap between healthcare providers and patients and it has been the driving force for better and more accessible treatment, improved patient care and efficiency.

Patient satisfaction is of paramount importance. And this article speaks about our journey of improving the patient feedback system and response rates in order to address the needs of the patient in real time.

Digital survey tools are nothing special in the business world, but they are the new tool in the healthcare system still burdened with paper. Traditional paper-based surveys— usually used by a subset of patients often yield feedback from less than 10 percent of the patient population, can be subject to transcriber error and typically do not provide timely or statistically reliable data.

Background:

Patient experience has become an increasingly important component in the assessment of healthcare systems worldwide. The measurement of patient experience is important because it provides an opportunity to establish benchmarks and to monitor the performance of health care organizations, to improve care, to enhance strategic decision making, to pay attention to patients’ expectations and to make healthcare organizations more transparent and accountable to their local populations.

With the evolution of digital applications, such as app-based surveys and touchscreen kiosks we choose to move away from the paper based surveys to a digital methodology to measure patient experiences real time and act on it quickly.

Paper Patient Survey forms

Six months ago,we were worried as we were not getting the desired response rates of patient surveys and we were spending lot of time in analyzing the results and the time consuming step of segmenting and sending the results to the concerned department. It was difficult and time consuming to keep a track of the complaints and also patients were not very keen to fill a paper feedback form. Of course, one of major drawbacks in a fledgling but growing organization is that the data was retrospective and helped with system changes but did nothing for the patients while a commitment to excellence in the hospital, our top management and the board decided to digitize this process as a way to manage the patient complaints efficiently.

From the end of last year, Health City Cayman Islands started managing the Patient satisfaction surveys and feedback digitally with the help of an App to capture real time patient experience and to act on patient concerns quickly.

Touchscreen kiosks were placed in strategic locations of the hospital with a message for the patients to use problem occurred.

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Time consuming to analyze the results

Being a new organization and also working on the principles of lean management, our customer care manager does multitasking and collecting the surveys every week, analyzing it and sending it to respective departments did consume a good chunk of time.

Moving to Digital Patient satisfaction Surveys

As patient satisfaction is one of the key components of our all-round the feedback system and also surveys were given to Inpatients at the time of discharge using tablet computers.

Emailing Survey links to the patients:

To capture the unbiased feedback we also started sending the survey link to all the patients via emails and the links were directly merged with the kiosk survey responses.

This system help edour team to analyze patient feedback instantly and accurately, eliminating the use of paper and long wait times for results to be analyzed. Furthermore, it has encouraged more participation from patients.

Real time feedback

The digital system has helped us to see the responses in real time on the dashboards of the heads of departments which helps them act on the concerns in quick time.

Better Patient experience

Majority of the patients are tech savvy these days and they feel comfortable to use the kiosk compared to the paper forms.

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Quick action on complaints

All heads of the departments have access to the feedback dashboards on their computers and they can see the complaints real time which has helped with action on complaints quickly.

The assigned tasks and the status of the action taken is also available on the dashboards.

The Quality manager assigns the task to the concerned departments for all low rating feedback.

Studies in several countries suggest that healthcare managers and clinicians often struggle to link patient experience data to local improvement initiatives. Robert et al. found that appointing a champion or leader on patient experience resulted in a significant improvement in the quality of patient experience research and in the ability of organizations to act on the results.

Track the progress

The dashboard has a section to see all the assigned tasks and the status of the task. The concerned department has to complete the task by taking corrective actions like speaking to the patients and taking necessary actions.

Email alerts for low ratings

We get emails for all the low rating feedback and also daily, weekly and monthly summary of the responses.

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Reduced time in analyzing the results

The system automatically analyze the results and it takes two less than minutes to get the detailed summary of the results.

Net Promotors Scores

The system automatically calculates the net promotors scores which is consider more relevant in assessing the patient’s satisfaction level.

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Conclusion:

Many hospitals have adopted digitized patient feedback systems and continually gauging patient satisfaction and using the digital feedback system to build on quality improvement initiatives will help demonstrate a commitment to patient-centred care and improve the overall healthcare experience.

Digital survey data can be captured automatically and downloaded quickly without transcription error thereby saving time, reducing costs, and maximizing data accuracy.

For those patients who are not tech savvy, the staff can help the patient by using the paper survey forms and feed the data into the digital system.

As with paper surveys, digital surveys need to be designed well to be usable in practice and acting on the feedback and communicating the actions to patients is best service recovery method which every hospitals should strive for.

Currently, we are working towards increasing the response rate by creating awareness campaigns with posters informing patients of surveys and by increasing the frequency of emails with the survey links to the patients.

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Reference:
NLCAHR July 2016 | Rapid Evidence
Report: The Effectiveness of Digital Surveys for Patient Feedback

Robert G, Cornell, J. Bearley, S.et al. “What matters to patients?” Developing the evidence base for measuring and improving patient experience. Project Report for the Department of Health and the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement. 2011.

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