| | MARCH 20208By Ashish Sood, Head Technology, Nayati Healthcare & Research Pvt. Ltd. CHANGING THE OUTLOOK TOWARDS HEALTHCARE CHALLENGEShallenges often present themselves in two categories ­ avoidable and unavoidable. The avoidable challenges are the ones that we often fail to take care of and these remain unaddressed and thus unresolved. When we apply this notion to healthcare IT in India, one of the biggest challenge that most of us will agree to is EMR. In India, EMR has largely been unaddressed except for a very limited places. When we dive on to this challenge, we are often struck with the following roadblocks by clinicians as impediments towards getting on with it:1) Clinicians do not see any commercial benefit for using EMR except safety of records 2) The number of patients in OPDs are high and they do not get the time for recording notes and prescriptions in EMR3) Clinicians loose eye contact with the patients when they turn to the computer monitors to make the prescriptions in EMRThe last two decades saw many hospitals and institutions apply different solutions to make the clinicians use EMR. Voice to text, writing with a pen and auto transcription, etc were all tried and failed. Let us not get into the reasons of the failures. All of us must have tried some of these more than once in our life times in healthcare IT. If we analyse and compare some of the better EMR products available in the market today, we will see that some of these products have addressed some of these issues already. Some EMR products available today, have resolved the issue of time by introducing a lot of time saving factors ranging from favourites in diagnosis, complaints, investigations, medicines, surgeries / procedures and follow ups to pre-filled texts in diet, exercise and other advises. A few EMR products even have pre-defined templates for common health conditions like kidney stone. Such conditions have fixed investigations like USG-KUB, CT-KUB, fixed medicines like Stone 1b6, Voveran and fixed procedures like URS and DJ stenting, and even fixed follow ups of 4-6 weeks. In such cases, EMR pre-fill everything and lets the clinician make necessary changes in this pre-filled material based on the specifics of that particular patient. At the same time, a few EMR products have introduced tablet device compatible EMR products based on the touch and go interface, thus taking care of the eye contact issue by eliminating the use of a monitor, keyboard and mouse. The clinicians can now retain the eye contact and use EMR at the same time.Now, getting to the point where we can generate revenue from the use of EMR. Whether on paper or in electric version in the form of an EMR, clinicians have been generating leads in their daily usual prescriptions for ages. While prescribing in OPDs, clinicians enter information in the following sections in an EMR: IN MY OPINIONCEMR today is a lot more valuable than it was perceived to be in the former years. Given these benefits, clinicians today are much more open to EMR
< Page 7 | Page 9 >