Last updated on May 2nd, 2022 at 06:20 am

If we did this, we could have managed COVID 19 much more effectively.

What makes a place habitable? If you are not able to answer that, let us rephrase the question.
What facilities should be available in a place for a person to lead a comfortable life in the 21 st
century?

Creating such a solution was a challenge. However, as Software consultants this was a learning
opportunity for us. While working on this we arrived at a realization – if the same is replicated by
other hospitals it will result in mass up-gradation of processes in terms of operational convenience and accessibility. Collectively we will be more capable than enough to fight any adversity in the future.

The question is “why did this happen?”

We must understand that with such a troubling situation at hand, it is impossible to efficiently manage every single operation. Not to forget, the “Social Distancing”. Even if being the best available way to prevent people from getting infected, it proved to be a big obstacle to our daily work. This highlighted the most inefficient way of conducting operations in the said “most technologically advanced period”.

The issue lies in the way we conduct our operations, specifically “the medium”. Most of our operations are still done manually and that too on pen and paper. This in turn slows down the processes to a great extent. If we take a hospital into consideration, this causes a great deal of
hindrances in the processes such as patient admissions, compliance, resources management, equipment handling, purchases, etc.

The matter of concern is that hospitals still have huge piles of data on paper and still conduct their operations manually. Now IMAGINE finding a document related to a patient from such a mountain size rack of papers and then running to the concerned person just to be sent back because you missed the bill receipt.

Talk about waste of time!

But not all hospitals run like that. Post COVID-19, some hospitals have understood the need for change and adopted new methods to avoid such disasters in the future. Here’s one example of a hospital that took just this single action to increase its efficiency by a factor of ten.

Before we get the fruit, we ought to plant the seed, right? In other words, we need to understand what a hospital does. Here we are talking about a multi-specialty hospital. This hospital provides high-quality healthcare and medical treatment in a wide range of disciplines to people at an affordable cost. It offers super specialty services with a state-of-the-art department for Nephrology, Cardiology & Cardiothoracic Surgery, Pediatrics Surgery, Gastroenterology, Medical Oncology & Onco Surgery, Plastic & Cosmetic Surgery, Urology, Neurology & Neurosurgery, Endocrinology & Rheumatology, etc.

A hospital with such facilities will certainly be sought after by those in need. Hence, it will be safe to assume that the hospital will deal with a huge volume of valuable patient information which will only keep on increasing with progress in time.

Talking about the challenges, the hospital had their entire patient records available as hard copies only. It was difficult to track and manage physical files. A single repository for all documents was not available, thereby impacting the operational efficiency of administration. Searching for a single document or a set of patient documents was an unwieldy task. A patient file consists of multiple document types like identification documents, medical history records, etc. It was difficult to identify the missing document from each patient file.Cross-departmental movement of documents was a challenge. One had to run from one section to another. The same happened for departments in different buildings as well. Transfer of files for internal and external audits was also a challenge (for instance, sharing all documents on an audit request took time in collating and sharing it with the auditor). Role-based access management was not available. History logs for tracking & monitoring the actions made on records were not available.

Now we get to the part where the hospital understood the said problems and decided to turn things around. All the above problems could be solved by Digitization and so it happened. What was our role in that? Epsum Labs as a Software Consultant created a solution for them – a workflow management system. We implemented the web-based workflow management system to provide an end-to-end solution for managing patient files. After consultation with the administration, document types were created in the tool along with the fields to assist users to search the documents and get reports from them. Groups and Roles were created for all users along with permissions to ensure security while accessing and sharing documents through the system. It allowed users to tag documents in various color codes for fast access and easy reference. A user-friendly file transferring system was created to accelerate the cross-departmental transfer of information so that one could share any document with anyone with a few clicks.

As incredible as the solution sounds, so do the results. After successful implementation of the Workflow Management System, the hospital witnessed efficiency in management operations through faster digital file retrieval and sharing ability of documents to users across the organization. It allowed users to access the files from any computer system within the organization allowing real-time access to documents. Implementation of the system reduced the risk of loss of important patient documents. Sharing of documents with internal or authorized external users via secure, self-expiring links made it easier to stay compliant with information security guidelines. There was a huge leap in improving the security of information through role-based access management and encryptions.

Creating such a solution was a challenge. However, as Software consultants, this was a learning opportunity for us. While working on this we arrived at a realization – if the same is replicated by other hospitals it will result in mass up-gradation of processes in terms of operational convenience
and accessibility. Collectively we will be more capable than enough to fight any adversity in the future.