HP helps Kerala Govt's Department of Health and Family Welfare to improve patient services

HP Enterprise Services India announced that the Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Kerala, has selected HP to create an e-Health IT platform to enable the delivery of a digital healthcare solution and services for Health Care facilities across Kerala. The digital healthcare solution will help healthcare practitioners to improve patient care and focus resources where they will drive the best health outcomes.

The Department of Health and Family Welfare (DHFW) is responsible for delivering healthcare across a vast geographic area to more than 33 million citizens through more than 1,250 healthcare delivery facilities including over 1,000 public and community healthcare centres, and almost 200 hospitals and medical colleges. Delivering efficient and effective patient care was previously hampered by largely manual processes that generated many thousands of patient records which were often dispersed across many locations.

The DHFW chose HP to design and build a digital healthcare delivery roadmap for the 1,250+ facilities around the region. The roadmap outlines the steps to digitize the entire State healthcare delivery process in stages or phases starting from basic capturing of demographic details of every patient to complete Electronic Medical Record (EMR) creation.

The e-Health platform is the IT platform created across all care delivery systems to capture all activities and processes at the point of patient care. This includes the core technology for the Healthcare Management Information System, mobile applications, analytics and reporting. The HP platform will provide the following:
Centralized Monitoring and Management - through a universal database, dynamically updated to enable the Government to plan for and monitor the provision of public health care services.
E-Clinical services - to allow online prescription, online diagnostics and imaging services for speedy disposal of patient care needs resulting in creation of real time Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and a repository.
Disease Surveillance – to provide access to real time data from outpatient clinics, enabling timely alerts on outbreaks and communicable diseases.
Demographic Data - dynamically updated data would provide accurate and complete information on the population, disease profiles and geographic profiling of morbidity and mortality within the state.
Medical Research - a centralized database of Electronic Medical Records, Data Mining and Analytics would provide opportunities for doctors to conduct scientific studies and research work.

“Delivering the best patient outcomes relies on a coordinated and efficient approach across the many healthcare delivery facilities and medical staff,” said Marshal Correia, vice president & general manager, Enterprise Services, HP India. “This new e-health IT platform will enable transparent and efficient monitoring of all public health programs, medical inventory, Electronic Medical Records and Hospital Management Information Systems.”

The HP solution, in partnership with JK Technosoft, and utilizing government-provided infrastructure platforms, includes:

Integrated Hospital Management Information System (HMIS) - HMIS will enable staff to assign a unique identification number to the patient. With a centralised medical record accessible by any healthcare facility in the state, clinicians will be able to access the information needed to develop the correct diagnosis and treatment plan. In addition, with the medical records captured, healthcare staff can trigger proactive measures to respond more quickly to Disease Surveillance data.
Picture Archival and Communication System (PACS) - the PACS system provides a platform to store and view diagnostic images captured by various imaging equipment such as X-Ray, CT scan and MRI Scan. This will provide clinicians with vital information in a timelier manner and reduce the inconvenience and cost of repeated medical tests due to lost reports.
Testing for Systems, User Acceptance Testing and User training to over 3500 users – ensuring a consistent approach for data integrity and quality controls
Applications Management Services including on-site and application support – will ensure a speedy resolution and on-going delivery of patient services.

The provision of effective healthcare has become increasingly complex and costly for governments and providers. With HP’s depth of expertise and experience in building e-healthcare solutions medical staff can focus their attention on delivering better patient services and improved healthcare for citizens.