Hospital's Historic Shift

Set up in 1996 by the Apollo Hospitals Group

jointly with the Government of New Delhi, Indraprastha Apollo is today at the

forefront of medical technology and expertise in the country.

The largest corporate hospital outside the US, Indraprastha Apollo

provides a complete range of the latest diagnostic, medical and surgical

facilities for the care of its patients. The hospital has a capacity of 695

beds, with the provision for expansion to 1,000 beds in the future. Indraprastha

Apollo's mission is to achieve medical excellence with a human touch.

The organization is one of the pioneers in India for

implementing a hospital information system (HIS). In January 2002 it engaged

Wipro Healthcare to install and implement HIS called HIRePS. The software was to

be deployed on over 200 computer terminals spread across the sprawling hospital

complex comprised of multiple wings and nine floors.

Wipro's engineers provided constant upgrade patches for

HIRePS, resulting in a time-consuming and laborious task to install them

individually on each machine given the large spread of the hospital. Moreover,

even the small downtime required for systems upgrade affected the patient care

goals of the hospital. This was because all the patient data-including

registration, medication history and investigations were stored in the HIS

system and shared by the hospital's staff of 700 doctors, nurses, and

administrators.

Another challenge the hospital faced was keeping up with

advancing technology.  Indraprastha

Apollo was looking to upgrade its DOS-based HIS to a Windows-based system. At

the same time, it was also concerned about the continuing obsolescence of

hardware due to the market's frequent upgrade cycles to ever-faster machines,

particularly the worry that the new version of HIRePS might be incompatible with

older systems.

FutureSoft, a Citrix implementation partner, approached

Indraprastha Apollo with the idea of deploying the new HIS on the Citrix

Presentation Server. The proposed solution would enable centralized

administration and monitoring, as well as the capability to run on old as well

as new systems. The hospital evaluated the proposal and chose to implement the

Citrix software to deploy HIRePS. Now, 700 users access patient information via

the latest version of the HIS at any time, without interruption, from any

location in the hospital.

One of the key benefits Indraprastha Apollo has gained from

its Citrix solution is time savings both for end-users as well as IT staff.

For the hospital, ensuring zero downtime is critical for the

doctors and nurses who need access to HIRePS applications in a 24x7 environment

and the Citrix solution allows doing that. “The load-balancing feature of

Presentation Server helps us to ensure zero downtime,” explains R Srinivasan,

head-IT, Indraprastha Apollo. Another benefit is faster upgrade of computers.

Earlier, the hospital's IT staff used to spend weeks upgrading each computer

individually. Now, all machines are centrally upgraded in a matter of minutes.

Additionally, training the hospital staff has become a breeze.

Presentation server has also allayed the hospital's

worries about hardware obsolescence. Adds Srinivasan, “Deploying HIRePS on

Presentation Server has ensured that our applications will continue to run

irrespective of client configuration-whether it is a Celeron, a Pentium or a

PII.” This benefit is especially significant since it allows Indraprastha

Apollo to save as it grows-as the hospital rolls out more modules of the HIS,

they can run on the same hardware and without adding a single staff to the

hospital's technical manpower of 12 people.

Team DQ



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