Breach Candy Hospital goes for PACS Shopping

For over 50 years the Breach Candy Hospital Trust, has been a beacon of light for the suffering. Situated on the coastline of South Mumbai, the 173 bedded hospital is renowned for its medical expertise, excellent nursing care and quality diagnostics. Specialists on the hospital's panel of doctors include some of the most distinguished names in Indian medical profession. Many procedures in routine use including Coronary Angioplasty, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Critical Care ICU and Hysteroscopy were first performed here. The hospital has earned national recognition as a leader in interventional cardiology.

After understanding the exact requirement of Hospital, SoftLink decided to install C-PACS solution connecting to Cathlab with approximately one year of on-line storage on a high-end RAID L5 server for totally storage and security of Patient Images. The solution will create a centralized archive for the entire department.

Enterprise DICOM Workstations will be strategically placed across the hospital to increase physicians' access to patient data and improve the workflow for the operation. The solution will significantly improve capability for consultation. In addition to rapidly accessible, high-quality visual images, Quality Control tolls can potentially provide a more accurate diagnosis of the disease and cost savings by decreasing the amount of devices used on interventional cases.

SoftLink’s C-PACS architecture is highly scalable, allowing hospitals to start with a single-lab solution and move to multi-center and multi-modality network based solutions over a period of time. The solution supports other imaging modalities such as electro physiology and vascular labs, cardiac CT, Color Dopplers, 2-D/3-D Echo making it a “ONE Stop” solution for image archival, storage and review for the hospital!

The simultaneous review of patient images from multiple modalities, in multiple windows positions the cardiologist to make a better diagnosis as he has 360 degree view of all the diagnostic images of a patient on ONE screen!

Patients connecting with physicians via social media

While some physicians may dread the idea, patients are increasingly eager to connect with them via social media. Increasingly, patients are seeing this as a way around the limitations of traditional practice models, which include limited hours and playing phone tag with doctors.

"Friending" doctors on Facebook and the like is a natural, and probably unavoidable, outgrowth of existing trends, experts note. After all, according to one study by Manhattan Research of 9,000-odd U.S. adults, 5 percent of respondents had sent or received an email message to a doctor, and 49 percent wanted to do so in the future. And these days, social networking is a short step up from email.

When patients connect with doctors online, some have focused on getting routine chores done, such as prescription refills and having health questions answered. But others have gone as far as sending important messages--such as requests for help with serious issues--directly to their doctor via Facebook. In some cases, when they're dealing with e-friendly physicians, they've gotten quicker answers that way

Fortis Healthcare Buys 10 Wockhardt Hospitals in India

As India's growing middle class clamors for better medical attention outside the nation's cash-starved public hospitals, Fortis Healthcare Ltd. has come up with a prescription: a rapid expansion of its private hospital chain.

Indian health-care consumers, sick of long waits at sometimes-grungy clinics, have embraced the upsurge in clean, efficient and professionally managed hospitals. Also, recent health scares over everything from mosquito-derived Dengue fever to swine flu have crowded public hospitals, pushing even more patients through the sliding doors of Fortis's private facilities.

"India's problems have given us an opportunity to put together a damn good health-care network," said Shivinder Singh, managing director of Fortis.

The latest deal came Monday August 24^th when Fortis agreed to buy 10 hospitals for 9.09 billion rupees ($187 million). The purchase from Wockhardt Hospitals Ltd. gives Fortis 75% more hospital beds and a reach into big cities outside northern India -- including Mumbai, Kolkata and Bangalore. With the acquisition, Fortis will own or operate 38 hospitals across India with 5,200 beds, company officials said.

Fortis earlier this year bought or assumed management of four other hospitals in its effort to expand nationwide from its origins in northern India. Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Ltd. is the nation's biggest private chain, with 7,500 beds and 43 hospitals.

Fortis's expansion reflects India's changing health-care picture. India's urban middle class has turned the medical-services industry upside down by demanding better care than the government can provide -- and than the vast majority of the population can afford. Only about 12% of Indians have health insurance, according to industry analysts. But with the number of policyholders covered by the private health-insurance industry growing about 40% a year in India, many more eventually will be able to afford to pay more for services here.

"Indian health care is on the threshold of tremendous reform and expansion," said Muralidharan S Nair, a health-sciences partner at Ernst & Young.

Until recently, most of India's private hospitals have been products of yesteryear -- small, stand-alone institutions founded by individual doctors. The rise of the corporate hospital chain gained momentum only in the past five years as India has boomed. These chains are buying hospitals or winning contracts to manage them. Often, the chains replace physician chief executives with professional managers who standardize business practices and buy supplies in bulk across the chain to drive down costs.

Health Advantage for Patients Who Use EMR

Electronic reminders can help heart patients stay healthy and on their medications even though they are no longer being closely monitored, new research shows. The study is among the first in the U.S. to show that electronically maintained health records can improve outcomes among heart patients and possibly even lower health care costs.

Researchers followed 421 patients with coronary artery disease enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente Colorado managed care health plan. Medical records for the patients, including physician visits and laboratory and pharmacy data, were kept electronically. The patients were participants in an intensive pilot intervention program designed to keep them on cholesterol-lowering and blood-pressure-lowering drugs with the goal of reducing their risk for future heart attacks and strokes.

The program -- which linked patients to teams of cardiologists, pharmacists, nurses, and primary care doctors through electronic health records and direct counseling -- resulted in high rates of patient drug compliance and attainment of goals for blood pressure and cholesterol levels. After participation in this intensive program, half of the patients were moved to a program where they were followed only by their primary care doctor and received far less costly electronically generated reminders of needed lab tests. These electronic prompts proved to be just as effective as the intervention program for keeping cholesterol and blood pressure at goal levels. Using technology and integrated systems already in place, we can help keep patients healthy for longer and deliver continuity of care in a cost-efficient manner.

Wireless home health said to grow nearly 15-fold by 2013

The market for home-based wireless healthcare products and services isn't just going to grow; it's going to explode over the next four years. Parks Associates, a Dallas-based research company, forecasts U.S. sales of wireless home-health technology to soar to $4.4 billion in 2013 from just $304 million this year, in part due to the federal stimulus money for health IT. Parks estimates the market to grow by 96 percent next year, 126 percent when the stimulus takes effect in 2011, and by 95 percent in 2012, before cooling to a 68 percent growth rate in 2013. Device and service connectivity is the model for future home health care applications, and mobile networks will link a growing number of monitoring products to health care providers," says a study.

EMR vs EHR vs PHR vs LHR

Electronic Medical Record (EMR) encompasses the medical history – tests, diagnoses, treatments and other elements – of a single patient specific to a particular facility. The record is owned by the provider. EMRs may be used to achieve a more efficient exchange of information within the facility and to guide clinical decision-making. Likewise, an EMR system describes the local provider’s computerized environment that makes these records possible.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) ideally includes a patient’s complete medical history, spanning multiple providers and geographies. A comprehensive EHR requires compilation of data from various EMRs. In the case of personal health records (PHR) such as those provided by Microsoft HealthVault® or MyHealthRecord®, and Google Health®, the patient owns the record, but most EHRs are owned by a facility, insurance company or insurance consortium. The EHR is the type of record proposed to reside on a shared National Health Information Network.

Legal Health Record (LHR) is similar to an EMR in that it comprises a patient’s information from a single care provider, but carries with it a more binding and unalterable structure. According to the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), the LHR serves as the hospital’s permanent business record and would be released upon request if the appropriate patient consent was on file.

HL7 finalizing PHR standards

Health data standards group Health Level Seven (HL7) has begun accepting votes on whether or not to approve its Personal Health Record Functional Model (PHR-S), an interesting development given that health plans, employers and providers still don't seem to have agreed upon what content a PHR should actually contain. Both members and non-members of HL7 can vote on the standards, though non-members must pay an administrative fee to participate. If approved, the HL7 standards will become a draft standard, and will be refined for two years until they comply with ANSI requirements.

HL7's standards define what functions a PHR and security features are common in existing PHR platforms, and offers ideas on how to share between PHRs or from PHR to EMRs. PHR-S may be the first industry standard defining core functions for PHRs, according to the group's statement.