Tech infusion in business processes lets healthcare providers do what they do best

Soma Tah

With a burgeoning population of 1.3 billion spread across urban and rural India, India poses a unique challenge for the healthcare ecosystem. When compared to its peers in Asia and Western countries, India is a cost-competitive market too. However, an increased focus on digitalization and a conducive policy environment have brought transformations to the healthcare ecosystem and opened new doors for both healthcare providers and patients. Rising healthcare expenses and a greater emphasis on preventive care also made it critical for the healthcare companies to invest in cutting-edge technologies such as cloud, IoT, and AI, etc.

We spoke to Kaushik Mitra, Senior Director, Cloud ERP, Oracle to know how the power of data, digitalization, and emerging technologies have been helping healthcare organizations streamline their internal processes, improve outcomes at reduced cost and resources, so that they can maintain a laser-sharp focus on patient care and improved care delivery.

COVID-19 has sped up the digitalization efforts across the healthcare sector. How much of it is directly linked to the patient care delivery and how much of it is for streamlining/ digitalizing business processes/ operations? 

Digitalization in the healthcare industry goes both ways, patient care delivery and streamlining business operations are interlinked. In the healthcare sector, time is of paramount importance; even a moment's delay can mean the difference between life and death. Every minute we save our caregivers allows them to spend more time on patient care. Every rupee we save in financial and human resource operations translates into a rupee of healthcare for our underprivileged communities.

Implementing automated solutions would help healthcare organizations to streamline their internal process so that they can focus on patient care. Therefore, investing in emerging technologies provides our caregivers and employees simple, accessible, and unified solutions behind the scenes to ensure a best-in-class patient experience; otherwise, even the most basic tasks would be frustrating.

Some of the many advantages these technologies can provide comprise of the facilitation of communication between doctors, improving medication safety, reducing potential medical errors, increasing access to medical information, and encouraging patient-centered care. The adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is instrumental in improving care, reducing glitches, and bringing about cost-efficiency. Similarly, AI-enabled apps are helping patient care delivery through personalized care. 

Also, new-age and digital-savvy doctors are continuously looking for means to get clinical and operational information at their fingertips for better diagnosis and treatment. This leads to clinics and hospitals becoming more sensitive to data and AI-enabled solutions are cutting down the workloads of the doctors ensuring their operational efficiency is improved and they can solve cases at a faster rate.

What kind of cutting-edge technology/solution adoption prospects do you see among the Indian healthcare providers? What kind of challenges do you see in terms of fast-paced adoption?

Technology has been the main catalyst for change within the healthcare industry and has directly improved both the patient and provider experience. With the pandemic, the healthcare industry has been under tremendous pressure and healthcare providers are realizing the need to embrace new-age technologies, which have been overlooked in previous decades but have recently played an important role in controlling Covid-19. Technologies such as AL, ML, IoT, blockchain, chatbots, etc. with a strong foundation of cloud are among some of the trending technologies that healthcare providers are looking to adapt to evolve their business.

We believe that the future of healthcare lies in the hands of technology and we will witness that various cutting-edge technologies like smart health and AI-led personalized healthcare will help medical practitioners in making fast and data-driven diagnosis and treatment plans.

Not only this, the healthcare sector in itself is transitioning to the growth-mode, and we foresee them as stepping up to support the economic progress of our country in the next five years. Companies who have been ahead of the curve on digital adoption will be focused on speed and efficiency vs. cost-cutting through tech intervention to stay further ahead of the curve.

However, as an observer of the market for so long, I feel that today’s healthcare landscape has become a double-edged sword. While it’s filled with life-saving technologies and opportunities to provide better care to patients, healthcare’s unpredictable nature can sometimes cause complexities and challenges for those in the field and pandemic is a relevant example in this context. Combined with an overwhelming amount of data, data types, data silos, and data sources, organizations are struggling to find a system that will help manage and share critical information. With the right technologies and processes in place, organizations can use data and analytics to transform the healthcare continuum – providing a better experience for patients and customers.

What are some of the products and solutions that Oracle has pioneered keeping the healthcare sector in mind and how can they help healthcare providers in the new normal? 

There is an immediate need for agile and open systems which is crucial in addressing the new market demands and, more importantly, to provide new opportunities for organizations as they meet the challenges that will come from this new paradigm and that is where Oracle plays a role as a strategic partner.

We are working with healthcare organizations that require the right technology roadmap to maximize their access to data, tools, efforts, and time to carry out and build a future platform. We provide a diverse range of solutions keeping the market requirements in mind and our offerings are supporting healthcare providers across the world in improving outcomes at reduced cost and resources across the continuum of care such as administrative, clinical, and financial. Our products are integrated focusing on both backend operations, employee management as well as customer experience solutions.

Oracle, through its philosophy of ‘humanizing data’, has assisted organizations globally in strengthening their healthcare capacities to improve overall medical service delivery and patient experience.  The biggest advantage for healthcare organizations with Oracle technology is they can streamline their internal processes so that they can focus solely on patient care. This digital transformation essentially helps the organization to transition from volume-based care to value-based care. Many firms are turning to flexible and scalable SaaS solutions for supply chains and altering their processes to boost efficiency by leveraging novel technologies such as AI, IoT, and Blockchain.

Could you please tell us about some specific customer challenges that you have solved in India? 

In India, we are assisting our customers in driving accurate agile plans across finance and operations, thereby improving decision-making with Oracle ERP and EPM cloud solutions. Our Oracle SCM solution was specifically designed keeping in mind the customer challenges of the supply chain. When the pandemic-induced lockdowns disrupted the supply chains completely, organizations turned to SCM solutions to ensure smooth deliveries of essential medicines, vaccines, and other medical equipment even with lesser human interaction. In India’s efforts to vaccinate the entire population, a solution like this could be the backbone to ensure that the vaccination reaches all geographical regions.

Oracle Cloud ERP, for instance, has empowered decision-makers at Narayana Health, the world’s largest heart hospital to treat 20,000 patients a day to streamline processes and run an extremely cost-efficient service. Organizations like Apollo Hospitals, Aster DM Healthcare, Omega Healthcare, Dr. Reddy’s Lab, Aurobindo Pharmaceuticals are also using Oracle solutions for their internal processes. With our solutions, we have been able to support healthcare organizations navigate the complex needs of health systems and their patients by providing technologies that improve population health, lower per capita costs, and improve care quality. We have also partnered with pharmaceutical organizations and insurance firms like Religare Health Trust and India First Life Insurance to transform their business.