Interview: 'We use technology to reduce patient anxiety time'

In the last couple of years, healthcare
has witnessed huge technology deployment, but still lags behind other verticals.
Your comments.

I do agree that healthcare is far behind in technology adoption.
Today except for a few corporate run hospitals, other hospitals, especially
government hospitals have not done enough to computerize their operations. If
all healthcare providers computerized their operations, they could share patient
information among themselves which will benefit the patients. If the information
can be accessed it will be a major cost saving factor for the patient and also
patient will get speedy treatment. Healthcare insurance, government and
healthcare service providers should have a common platform for sharing
information by taking advantage of IT.

In this part of the world SRL Ranbaxy was the first corporate
run clinical reference lab adopting IT for all the processes right from the
inception and continues to use IT to reduce patient anxiety time by providing
speedy information to doctors to help them to diagnose faster.

Data management is still an issue in
healthcare sector. What has been done so far in this area and what needs to be
done?

In the clinical trial arena, India is going to be a major hub for all
the pharma companies to do the trials and only IT can help them to collect the
patient's data digitally. These trials can be conducted in the shortest
possible time by locking the collected database and processing them. So,
clinical data management is the other big segment where IT is going to turn
around the entire drug development process. The entire clinical trial study
transaction will be digitalized and the trend has already started in India as
well. Today everyone wants to have India as their part of the study location
because of the different ethnic community, patient profile available which
reduce the time of patient recruitment process and also the IT capability and
English speaking population.

Business intelligence is gaining
acceptance in pharma companies. What role do you see such solutions play in drug
discovery and research?

When the new drug is not working on a patient based on the
information captured during the clinical trial, the drug development process may
be called off resulting in time and money loss to the pharma companies. Pharma
companies can figure out which patient with a specific clinical history are most
likely to benefit from the formulations in new drug by using business
intelligence tools. This can reduce the chance of failures of drug development
process.

Pharma companies can use the pathology data and integrate it
with other clinical data to help the researchers find out the correlations and
drug reactions in a patient.

Since SRL Ranbaxy operations are scattered
all across the country, how does technology help you integrate all your
processes?

We operate from a central laboratory in Mumbai, and have 16 satellite
labs all over India servicing more than 375 Indian cities and other countries.
IT is used right from patient sample registration for diagnostic testing to
report delivery. Bar-coding of sample has been used to identify the sample.
Also, instruments are interfaced with the system so that the testing
analyzer/instrument automatically reads the sample to perform the test as per
the registration information and then passes the result to the database.

Currently, SRL has seven locations connected using MPLS VPN. In
our kind of business, communication is very critical and to do it cost
effectively we have implemented VoIP solution and day-by-day the VoIP usage is
increasing, thus hoping that the VPN cost will be absorbed by return from VoIP.

Rahul Gupta

rahulg@cybermedia.co.in