Data Revolution in Healthcare and Lifesciences Industry

Yesterday evening, when I was sipping my best cuppa of Coffee...My friends rang me..What time dude..Rememeber we need to meet and discuss..the same..How profitable a business is ehealth...My head was spinning though, I still said Yes...After I came back I thought I should write about Ehealth as a concept and profitability. For years, thousands of people around the world have been publishing small Websites dedicated to a specific health or mental health topic. Maybe it was a site devoted to colon cancer, or breast cancer, or traumatic brain injuries. Maybe it was a site full of information about depression, or mania, or borderline personality disorder. Thousands of people toiled hundreds of thousand of hours to create these small, informative sites, linking to other great informative sites or which are already successful and all that, but does that works? In late 1996 and early 1997, companies started forming around the idea of compiling a whole bunch of health or mental health informat...

Let us look at Five big points first..and then we will understand how they are interrelated. Health care Delivery system in India India is a vast country of 1. 4 billion population • It consists of 29 states and 6 Union Territories governed by a federal system • Health is a state subject which follows a three tier system – primary health centre catering a group of villages, Secondary level health centre located at district level and medical college hospitals constitute the tertiary level located in the big cities. Telemedicine in India: Potential of ICT to improve health care  65% of 1100 million will be literate by 2015  60% of rural India has access to TV coverage.  650,000 existing PCOs ® internet kiosks,.  400,000 villages already have telephone connections.  Internet users in India 2m Dec 2001, 8.5m 2003, will grow to more than 10 million by 2010. Need for Telemedicine • Non availability of facilities / skills / technology locally(rural /remote area) • Urgency of treatment...

I wanted to have some more inputs about any kind of handicap be it mobility, blindness, handicapped or deafness to e-health. Some people may be surprised to find out that the blind and visually impaired are about as likely to be on the internet as a sighted person. It can seem like a daunting task to learn to use a computer system, but the fact is, there are plenty of easy ways for the visually impaired to get online. A common method for computer access for the blind and visually impaired is a screen reader. There are many screen reader programs available; the most common is the JAWS screen reader. A screen reader takes the output from Microsoft Windows and converts it to speech. The screen reader will tell you that you are currently in the Internet Explorer browser, and it will read to you the contents of the web pages. With time, and practice, a blind or visually impaired user can become very proficient at using a computer system. Screen Readers offer a great degree of flexibility;...

There was a time in India when Air travel, matrimony, Jobs and Real estate were not organised, and then came Yatra.com, Bharatmatrimony.com, Naukri.com and magicbricks.com to organise it..Result= Major Hit If we have a look at the medical tourism side of Online Reach and approach, We have everything A rich heritage, toursit attractions, High tech specialists, Good hospitals..everything... Then why even good sites like recoverdiscover.com are not getting enough traffic, The website though older than Blog are not able to get good rankings. While the Government has been most positively speaking about promoting medical tourism, it seems that when opportunity comes calling, it is looking the other way. Read this: Government stance "We have not come to that stage of taking that leap in medical tourism yet," said B. Suman, Tourism Director, for not participating in the expo. "Hospitals here have not come up as expected," Mr. Suman said. "However, a meeting will be hel...

Improve Process: 1. Define the problem - that is wait time and the high number of non-emergency patients 2. Develop a solution - in an emergency room situation, this can include adding beds by expanding the department or decreasing the size of current rooms; outsourcing certain testing and radiology services; and/or adding an ‘express care’ program to deal with non-emergency patients 3. Form a plan for improving the process, measuring improvements to the process, and reducing deviations from the goal - many hospitals have found that Lean Six Sigma practices are a particularly effective way of identifying and dealing with the challenges and problems inherent to health care . How Six Sigma help reduce Medical Errors: Six Sigma is a process improvement method that focuses on eliminating defects by reducing variation. It relies heavily on statistical analysis of data and strong problem-solving techniques. For more than a decade, companies such as GE, Motorola and Toshiba have used Six S...

Defining e-health - where are we? E-health is health's version of e-commerce: that is, conducting health business electronically. E-health is the combined use of electronic communication and IT in the health sector, both at the local site and at a distance for clinical, educational and administrative purposes (Unstoppable rise of e-health, 1999). E-health is a broad, encompassing term that envelops information technologies and telecommunication technologies. Telehealth, the provision of health at a distance using telecommunications, is subsumed by e-health. Unfortunately there is a lot of confusion about this new field and some vendors are getting onto the hype bandwagon by adding "e-" to old solutions. Many new initiatives remain unproven, and, like modern art, time will tell which shall endure. Users' strategic goals and end users' needs should drive solutions and not the vendors or suppliers’ business models. However, sometimes the users' needs are latent a...

To understand the Barriers Better, Am sharing with you various Case Studies for the Same. The first case study involved a company that was primarily in the business of selling prescription drugs online. This was a pure Internet startup, rather than an existing pharmacy that added an online channel. ePharmacy focuses exclusively on the sale of (1) prescription pharmaceuticals, (2) over-the-counter (OTC) pharmaceuticals, (3) vitamins, minerals, supplements (VMS) and herbal products and (4) related healthcare products. The Company has invested over $10 million in state-of-the-art technology and facilities including fully automated pharmaceutical dispensing equipment that enables the company to fulfil customer orders rapidly upon receipt of the order via the Internet. ePharmacy began selling OTC pharmaceuticals and other healthcare products through its website in May 1999 and began sales of prescription drugs and providing healthcare information in late October 1999. With respect to prescr...

Current Utilization General use of the Internet for health points to a great demand for health-related information. For example, almost half the Internet users in 1997 reported looking for health information or support (FIND/SVP, 1997). A survey of 2,000 Internet users estimated that more than 24.8 million people sought online health and medical content in 1998, an increase of 44% from 1997 ("Double Mastectomy," 1999). E-health web sites have enjoyed growth that has outpaced general Internet use. For example, in 1999, general use of e-health sites grew 176% to almost 11 million (Media Metrix, 2000). According to Newsweek, the Web is currently a source of health or medical information for more than 50 million Americans. Patients and their families do more actual web surfing than investors, students or people who purchase online (Watson, 2001). Data from Forrester Research (Yonish, Ranguelova, Shrier, & Broadben, 2001) indicates that women are twice as likely as men to vi...

The eHealth strategy aims to address a number of issues currently being faced by people who provide care to patients and those who support them. The key issues can be summarised as follows: • Improved ability to access information that is integrated and accurate • Better support for clinicians and care providers from across the health system to interact more efficiently and effectively with each • Support for clinical and managerial decision making • Greater capability for managing patient flow through improved planning and scheduling • Support for location-independent health service delivery. Principles of Implementation: The principles for the implementation of the eHealth Strategy are: • Build on what exists today and re-use viable capabilities in place • Establish solid functionality and information, and then build new capabilities • Introduce new and extended capabilities in phases, and realise benefits incrementally • Identify solutions that improve quality of care and patient ou...

Resource generation The growth of e-health services has given rise to the need for a new breed of healthcare professionals, healthcare administrators and healthcare technologists. This industry needs people who can understand any two of healthcare, business and technology. Historically the healthcare industry has been the last adopter of technology, the same has been the case with healthcare education. Even till today, many of the medical, dental, nursing, pharmacology and other healthcare degrees do not have courses on information technology; ecommerce is only a far cry from reality. Courses in hospital and health administration have increased in the last 5 years or so. When the e-health services industry started about 3 year ago, companies relied heavily on people already employed by hospitals and on people employed by other similar companies. The industry has grown to such a size that people from non-healthcare backgrounds are being recruited and trained. Interestingly, a lot of yo...

Patient A patient can be defined as a person who receives medical examination, treatment, guidance or care from a health care professional. The contact between the patient and the health care services initiates the process of care. The patient is therefore the most important party in the health care system. A patient needs knowledge about basic health issues, access to information specifically relevant to his/her condition, awareness of health system and the options available. Practitioner The practitioner is any healthcare professional and is distinguished from a provider. The patient gets in touch with the physician (general practitioner or specialist) for consultation, which may include medical investigations, treatment or supervision of the plan of care. In e-health, it is practitioners who are engaged with clients or other practitioners in the delivery of health care. A practitioner needs access to best, up-to-date medical knowledge available pertaining to their patients. Provide...

The scale of e-health services in India has been very small so far, mostly limited to health awareness through portals, telemedicine and customer service using the internet. Even with such a small scale of operations, some significant changes are being made nationwide that will strengthen telemedicine initiatives and the healthcare industry as a whole. The most important initiative being, the standardization of exchange of health information between different entities within the healthcare sector. The Ministry of Health & Family Welfare and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology are jointly creating a national health information infrastructure, for easy capture and dissemination of health information. To support this infrastructure, necessary steps are also being taken in creating a legally safe environment that will protect the privacy and confidentiality of health information. Steps are also being taken to educate various stakeholders of the healthcare industry...

Your degree is in medicine, not computer science. Why then are so many physicians finding themselves focused on software these days? Government, payers and market forces are all pushing physicians to consider an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) strategy. As if practicing medicine weren't challenge enough, now you need to adopt a new layer of technology infrastructure… At the same time, the value in going digital with your patient records is increasingly clear and the technology has come of age. Just like a practice management system optimized your patient schedule and improved your receivables, today's EMRs promise to automate your clinical workflows. An EMR can reduce time spent charting, provide more efficient patient visits and help meet regulatory requirements. The good news is that selecting an EMR doesn't require in-depth technical knowledge. Instead, you simply need to roll up your sleeves and run a disciplined selection process - knowing what criteria to consider is...

Recent polls show that more than two-thirds of online health consumers would prefer to obtain healthcare information from those they know and trust, namely their physicians and hospitals Services what we need and Deal with in E-health: Internet strategy and return on investment analysis Inter/Intranet site and application design, development, and hosting Health content integration Physician find and referral databases Customer relationship management systems & Human resources management systems HIPAA privacy & security system analysis and development Dynamic systems: news & events, content authoring, personalization Database integration Secure patient document imaging systems What are Meaningful Returns? Healthcare marketing To date, analysis of healthcareÕs primary focus on Internet consumer marketing leaves little to be impressed with. As healthcare organizations review their expenditures in web technology against their expectations of attracting and converting web users ...