Healthcare IT Archives - InnoHEALTH magazine

The Digital Backbone of Modern Healthcare: India’s Health IT Transformation

Khushi Khandelwal — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 10:30:00 +0000

Mr. Sanjay Jain

In the latest episode of the InnoHealth Magazine podcast, host Dr. Soumya Singh sat down with Mr. Sanjay Jain, Founder and CEO of Akhil Systems Pvt. Ltd., to explore the evolving landscape of healthcare IT in India. With over three decades of experience in healthcare digitization, Mr. Jain offered rich insights into the journey of Akhil Systems, the digital transformation of hospitals, and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

A Three-Decade-Long Journey

Founded in 1994, Akhil Systems emerged out of a vision to fill the glaring gaps in healthcare automation. Mr. Jain recalled joining the company as a software developer, eventually becoming its co-leader with Rekha Murthy, his business and life partner. Their commitment to improving healthcare delivery through technology has fueled the company’s success across India and in more than 10 countries globally.

The company’s first major milestone came in 1995 with Mulchand Hospital in North India. This was followed by key partnerships with hospitals like Yashoda and Teerath Ram. An international breakthrough came in 2001 with an implementation project in Saudi Arabia—an experience that exposed Akhil Systems to sophisticated insurance and electronic medical record (EMR) requirements, far ahead of India’s at the time.

Turning Points in Health IT

A critical turning point arrived in 2004 with an ambitious project for STS Apollo Hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh (now Evercare). The goal was to build a paperless hospital on par with European standards. Mr. Jain proudly shared that for the last 20 years, patients at that facility haven’t carried a single paper prescription—proof of the system’s enduring success.

Challenges of EMR Adoption

Despite technological advancements, EMR adoption remains inconsistent in India. Mr. Jain emphasized that the barrier is rarely technological—it’s often behavioral. Even when hospitals are equipped with capable software, implementation falters due to inadequate planning, insufficient training, and resistance to change among medical staff. He stressed the importance of top-down commitment and continuous support to ensure successful adoption.

“One of the biggest lessons,” Mr. Jain said, “is that mindset matters more than the system. The same EMR works wonders in one hospital and is barely used in another.”

Key Features for Successful Implementation

Akhil Systems developed unique solutions like single-window billing and multilingual pharmacy packaging to streamline patient experiences. These innovations, supported by user-friendly apps and doctor-focused tools, highlight the importance of customizing IT systems to suit local workflows and user needs.

Mr. Jain offered practical advice to hospitals considering a Health Information System (HIS) purchase:

Start with a clear needs assessment
Involve consultants or expert teams
Focus on patient-centric design
Ensure interoperability and clinical documentation standards
Plan for seamless scalability and integration

Data Security: A Growing Concern

With increasing digitization, cybersecurity has become a critical issue. Mr. Jain admitted that this area has often been neglected but is now gaining attention following recent ransomware attacks. He stressed the importance of data encryption, secure communication protocols, regular backups, and robust firewall protections—whether data is stored on-premise or in the cloud.

“Security should be baked into the infrastructure and application from the start,” he warned, highlighting the role of standards like HIPAA, GDPR, and India’s upcoming DPDP Act.

The Future: AI, IoT, and Digital Ecosystems

Looking ahead, Mr. Jain is optimistic. He believes the next five years will be transformative for Indian healthcare, driven by:

Wider EMR adoption under national initiatives like ABDM
Remote patient monitoring using IoT and wearable devices
AI-powered diagnostics that assist clinicians with early detection
Mobile-first platforms that offer patients real-time access to their data

His company is preparing for this future with “Agastam,” a new cloud-native, microservices-based platform aimed at overcoming traditional EMR adoption challenges.

Final Thoughts

Mr. Jain’s journey is a testament to how passion, persistence, and purpose can drive meaningful change. From a developer to a leader in digital healthcare, his story mirrors India’s own transition from paper-based systems to intelligent, connected healthcare networks.

As he aptly summarized: “Digital transformation in healthcare is no longer optional. It is a necessity—and the time to act is now.”

Authors Biography

Sanjay Jain, Managing Director of Akhil Systems Pvt. Ltd., boasts three decades in healthcare IT. He transformed Akhil systems into a top global provider, implementing HIS in over 450 hospitals and earning multiple industry awards.

The post The Digital Backbone of Modern Healthcare: India’s Health IT Transformation appeared first on InnoHEALTH magazine.

Machine Learning in Claims Processing

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 07:57:09 +0000

Challenge

Healthcare costs across the world have soared over the past decades at a rate at which, where United States spends more on healthcare than the national budget of half of the countries in the world. A big chunk of those expenses relate to pharmaceutical products.

AI and IoT in Healthcare: Need of Future
Opportunity

Here is the opportunity for Machine Learning Solutions – in US, by and large, most pharmaceutical transactions are captured electronically as claims. These claims, and the way they are processed, cover a myriad scope of information including patient demographics, disease states, drug utilization review, formularies, coverage and utilization review, contra-indications, etc. This information can be used for a number of reasons – better pricingof drugs based on their utilization and volume, better prediction of diseases and therapeutic journeys where we can guess over time which drugs a patient will require, and a more interactive engagement of the patient using virtual “friends” to guide them through their therapy and ensure compliance, adherence and better outcomes.

IoT can truly Transform Rural Healthcare in India

Over the past several years, solutions have been operationalized working with payors, PBMs on cost and efficacy predictions for new therapies for HIV (PrEP treatment) and Hemophilia (Gene Therapy). Another application is successfully helping Pharmacy Benefit Managers predict their most efficient drug pricing for patients who are not covered with insurance, cost efficiencies for seasonal and style drugs to name a few. GxWave™ leverages LSTM algorithm (Long Short-Term Memory) in predicting price efficiencies, claim volumes, call center call volumes, and average margins.

Approach

Solutions such as GalaxE’s GxWave™ platform with solutions such as Claims Neurology described below, utilizes their proprietary technology to extract business rules from adjudication systems and then use prior claims data to predict various “edits” or applicable rules such as prior authorization (where the use of a specific drug requires express approval from the physician) or adjustments and accumulators so that across their therapy, the price they pay is properly adjusted for the full range of medicines and medical services the patient consumes. These pathways for the adjudication of a claim are then trained on neural nets that learn the time based, formulary based, disease and therapy-based trends.

AI and Cybersecurity in Digital Healthcare

The trained nets are then used to predict and project the therapeutic journey of a patient, or the volume and timeframe for the consumption of specific therapy in a given market.

With all the consolidations of drug & device industries in play, their efficiency has to be at the highest point in order to drive patient costs lower. GxWave™ is helping these entities with improving efficiency. With a combined data set comprising elements of documentation across the development lifecycle of an application with governing procedures and its intended use, natural language processing techniques can derive information from previously unexplored data sets that can be analyzed to ensure compliance to regulations, adherence to organization policies and procedures and alignment with the documented intended use of the system. Healthcare IT consists of diverse applications with multiple critical integrations at various levels where regulatory impact can be ambiguous and could be left unassessed. A change in the landscape has to be simultaneously assessed for regulatory and risk impacts (includes business, security and privacy risks) without delays ensuring all impacts are being planned for before the change is implemented.

Healthcare IT market builds the foundation of Artificial Intelligence
Advantages
A number of advantages have surfaced with these solutions:
1. Immediate re-categorization or inspection of current non-regulated applications that could potentially be regulated due to change in feature/functionality.
2. Expose deficiencies within the system that could lead to a potential replacement for not being able to satisfy customer and regulatory requirements.
3. Allow for continual monitoring instead of the traditional approach of conducting periodic reviews.
4. Improve software documentation quality across the application lifecycle.

This is just the beginning. We expect that solutions like GxWave™ will utilize data from genomics, patient profiles, therapy histories and help generate the most medically and economically rational and effective therapies for patients in the very near future!

About the authors

Sandipan Gangopadhyay is the President and COO of GalaxE and plays a key role in GalaxE’s continued worldwide expansion and operational success Prior to this, Mr. Gangopadhyay spent over a decade in high profile roles in both Pharmaceutical and Information Technology companies around the globe and instrumental in setting up one of India’s first private Software Technology Parks. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Bombay University, is a member of the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers, and is certified in the Governance of Enterprise IT.

Dheeraj Misra is the Chief Technical Officer and Senior Executive Vice President of GalaxE and has over 15 years of experience in the design, development, testing, porting and maintenance of application and system software for the healthcare industry. Prior to this, he spent a number of years in high profile roles at HCL Technologies, Context Integration, Eforce Global, and as a Research Specialist in Parallel Processing. He has a B.E. in Computer Engineering from REC, Allahabad.

Vijayaraj Chakravarthy, Senior Vice President of Delivery and Head of Strategic Business Unit, is a member of the GalaxE’s executive leadership team, responsible for organization growth and innovation through predictive analytics platform aiming to discover new cost reduction opportunities in the Healthcare ecosystem of the United States. He serves as a subject matter expert on various AI/ML-based platforms and frameworks. He is passionate about solving industry problems with automation methods and agile execution. His leadership style focuses on developing a positive environment, teamwork, passionate culture, and an entrepreneurial mindset. He has B.E in Electrical and Electronics from PSG College of Technology, India. He enjoys spending time with his family. He has a green thumb to nurture organic gardens. He likes to do tech-inspired research projects for Kids.

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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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IoMT: Protection against cyber-threats

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Fri, 04 May 2018 10:05:49 +0000

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a collection of medical devices and applications that connect to health- care IT systems through online com- puter networks. These include medi- cal devices equipped with Wi-Fi that allow machine-to-machine communication. Though the rise of the IoMT has improved processes and patient care but has also resulted in an increased number of vulnerabilities.

Healthcare IT security teams in India must be prepared to face possible cyber-attacks on connected medical devices in healthcare facilities, as well as home health devices. These devices have not been designed with security as its top concern since developers are primarily focused on its functionality and ease of use.

According to Allied Market Research, the global Internet of Things (IoT) healthcare market is expected to reach US$136.8 billion by 2021, registering a CAGR of 12.5 percent between 2015 and 2021, driven by easy availability of wearable smart devices and decreasing cost of sensor technology. Cyber-attacks will continue to be a threat for healthcare providers and likely in greater volumes going forward. The resulting overall downtime, incident response and legal fees, as well as long term reputational damage can cost hospi- tals millions and keep them from providing high quality care to patients. The best course of action is to ensure every hospital has a robust and integrated security strategy.

Keeping this in mind Fortinet offers certain strategies for healthcare organizations to prepare against imminent IoMT cyber-threats: A dedicated team needs to be put into place to uncover the latest threat intelligence so that real time threat and mitigation updates can be made expeditiously, before cybercriminals take advantage of any weaknesses in connected IoT devices or the critical services they provide. An organisation needs to ensure that their security posture is upto date with prevention and detection measures as well as develop and maintain good network hygiene which includes systematic patching and updating of vulnerable systems and replacing outdated technologies that are no longer supported.

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