Category: Healthcare IT

Neuro and Spine

eVaidya.com : Virtual doctor consultations in India


e Health Access Pvt Ltd., a telemedicine company recently announced launch of their new Healthcare webportal eVaidya.com. This will provide virtual Doctor Consultation to patients apart from providing free personal health record storage. Company already provides a similar service via ehealthaccess.com, eVaidya.com will be considered as the main brand going forward.

According to Jayadeep Reddy, CEO “eVaidya.com is more user friendly and works on all mobile devices and platforms. Apart from consulting our panel doctors via phone and email, we want our customers to store and check their Health trends on our portal and adopt more preventive measures to stay fit & healthy. Health record storage is a free service from eVaidya.com and going forward we will be working to sync multiple health gadgets for storing data and giving valuable health advice to the users.”

Developed with latest technology, a user will be able to create consultation with a doctor in less than 45 seconds. eVaidya mobile application will be available shortly for Android, iPhone and Windows smartphones. eVaidya app will help users to have quick and instant connectivity with doctors apart from storing valuable health data for notification and alerts from our virtual health center. Company is aimed at helping users in understanding their health trends with the network of specialists across India. Company believes that Health analytics is going to be an important tool in constantly encouraging users to adapt a healthy living. Also people adapting to preventive health care in India is increasing at a constant pace and it is expected to grow faster with internet and mobile penetration and via health gadgets.

Courtesy:  India PRwire

The Arogyada
www.arogyada.in
January 19, 2014 / by drsandeep.net

Five Key Challenges for Indian Health Insurance Industry

In the current scenarios Indian health insurance industry can be considered to still be in its infancy. The next few years posit a plethora of challenges. Have highlighted key five areas of concern.

1. Lack of standardised transactions between the insurer and hospitals or the insurer and insured. This often results in individual interpretation and methodology for processes like claims and pre-authorization

2. Use of non-standard terminologies with regards to treatment protocols and care plans. In fact absence or minimal documentation and implementation of standard care pathways become a cause of conflict with regards to services covered/not covered for payment via the insurer. This gets further aggravated with extremely poor usage and implementation of ICD codes

3. Skewed penetration (much higher in urban India than rural) of private health insurers within the Indian population leading to asymmetric distribution of risk. This ultimately on one hand bleeds the insurer, on other hand hits the insured due to higher premiums and finally also the hospitals due to higher rejection rates

4. Non SLA based transactions between hospitals and insurers. Response time and request closure time for crucial transactions like pre-auth filling, pre-auth approval, claim filling, and claim approval is still not a strictly followed dimension.

5. Both hospital and insurer hold sensitive patient data but we are still far from having any form of implementable India specific law or guidelines to protect and securely exchange patient data between two major pillars of healthcare industry

The Arogyada
www.arogyada.in
January 8, 2014 / by drsandeep.net

Gartner projects that Healthcare providers in India will spend Rs 57 billion on IT products in 2013

As per a press release by Gartner Inc., healthcare providers in India will spend 57 billion rupees on IT products and services in 2013, an increase of 7 percent over 2012 revenue of 53 billion rupees. This forecast includes spending by healthcare providers (includes hospitals and hospital systems, as well as ambulatory service and physicians’ practices) on internal IT (including personnel), hardware, software, external IT services and telecommunications.

In terms of spending categories Telecommunications, which includes telecommunications and networking equipment and services, will remain the largest overall spending category. Salaries and benefits paid to the information services staff will achieve the highest growth rate amongst the spending categories – forecast to be 18 percent in 2013.
Hospital information systems, picture archiving and communications systems, electronic health records and mobile technologies will be high on the agenda.

The Arogyada
www.arogyada.in
February 21, 2013 / by drsandeep.net

Healthcare IT : What Indian Government is doing and what it should do?

From outcomes perspective, many studies have shown that Health IT has the potential to enable a dramatic transformation in the delivery of health care, making it safer, more effective, and more efficient. Taking lessons from developed nations and looking at the trends, in future healthcare IT is not going to play a side role but it is going to take a central stage in all healthcare business operations. With this background, it seems to be a crucial time to come up with National Health Information Technology policy, guidelines and standards to ensure uniformity in HIT adoption and use across the country…..Read More at HospitalInfraBiz.com

The Arogyada
www.arogyada.in
February 18, 2012 / by drsandeep.net

Healthcare IT: Is it helping us?

Yeah it is helping us, that’s what most of the doctors perceive as per a recent survey conducted by Accenture across eight countries with a sample size of 3700 doctors. The sample included baskets having 500 doctors per country in Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Spain and the United States and 200 doctors in Singapore between August and September 2011.

Figure 1: Source- Accenture Newsroom
http://newsroom.accenture.com/news/doctors-agree-on-top-healthcare-it-benefits-but-generational-divide-exists-according-to-accenture-eight-country-survey.htm

Key areas where Healthcare IT was strongly rated to have a positive impact were:

  • Better access to quality data for Clinical research (70.9 percent of the sample reported positive benefits)
  • Improved coordination of care (69.1 percent)
  • Reduction in medical errors (66 percent).

What is one common thing amongst these three areas? The key variable behind these three areas is efficient data management and interchange which has been brought about by the healthcare IT revolution. Healthcare delivery being a complex cognitive environment, there is always a need for complex decision making which is mostly critical in nature. The attribute of providing right information at right time has resulted in these positive perceptions towards role of IT in enabling clinical research, improving coordination of care and reducing medical errors.

There are some areas about which the study population seems to be skeptic about (where they have responded with “negative impact”, “no impact” or “didn’t know”)

  • reducing unneeded procedures (43.6 percent)
  • improving access to services (43 percent)
  • improving patient outcomes (39.2 percent)

If you notice, all these three areas are potential outcomes which have multiple-causality. There are many direct and indirect causations which can impact these areas. Most of the clinicians have a viewpoint which sees more direct cause-effect and looks for direct impact of clinical actions on the outcomes rather than indirect causations, owing to their experiences. From the viewpoint of a clinician, “unneeded procedure” is more a function of clinical choice, similarly “patient outcome” for doctors is more a function of success of clinical regimens and surgical procedures. IT may play a role of enabling tool in these but to ascribe the direct causality of “reducing unneeded procedures” and “improving patient outcomes” is rather too much to expect and ask for.

Another interesting finding of this survey is that U.S. physicians have rated the benefits of EMR and HIE lower than their international colleagues. This comes from a country which is investing the most when it comes to healthcare IT. Why is that? Is it because excess of reforms and IT fume already doing rounds in the air have made them obnoxious? Or is it that IT has reached a point of diminishing return and they are increasingly seeing less value in it?

The Arogyada
www.arogyada.in
January 16, 2012 / by drsandeep.net