Sharan H P, is Director of Projects at IQura and has over 8 years of experience in IT solutions.

In a prior capacity, he headed the design and development of an extensive and sophisticated web-based hospital management system. Titled “Outcome Management System”, the solution addressed a requirement for the implementation of a full hospital management system. The system was specifically aimed for the area of Rehab Medicine and handled the different unique processes that apply from admission to discharge to post discharge care. Sharan led this project with a team size of 12 technical people. He has held the primary role in the project management and has been responsible for analyzing, visualizing and designing this Internet based solution.

The project was developed over a period of 12 months with a team of 5 people. Anand was responsible for the analysis and architectural design of the solution, client interaction, onsite deployment, and training.

It provides complete management of a hospital’s information systems including multi-locational health care groups. It provides for management of patients including admission, assessment, diagnosis, evaluation, discharge, consent forms and post-discharge services. It also has comprehensive features for staff management including recruitment, personal details, assignment, appointments and visits. Exceptional reporting is available, both fixed-format and user-definable. The system also supports asset management for hospitals wherein equipment recording, accounting and costing can be handled. Full function image support for patients, staff, x-rays, etc. is available. Security is comprehensive and follows a group/user profile mechanism in line with Windows NT. Access permissions can be set for most functions.

The larger healthcare automation system mentioned above, was meant to provide a comprehensive outcome monitoring mechanism to manage the complex process of interrelated medicine and was envisaged to plug the requirement for an automated hospital and patient management utility, that could be used by organizations spread over vast geographical areas. This system can be used to efficiently manage the clinical processes and optimize resource utilization using integrated outcome and cost data.

In order to address the demand for value from healthcare services in the US, health care providers need to have a mechanism to quantify outcome, identify the process leading to the outcome and also be able to quantify the actual cost. This system addressed that need as a tool that allows them to evaluate these issues in an integrated fashion, redesign the processes, implement them and measure outcome.

This system provides the hospital personnel the ability to maintain the patient database as well as other relevant information. It captures demographics data as well as social history, insurance details, visit information, physician information, Medical History, Clinical résumé and case history about the patient. It also records the initial assessment of a patient, the patients diagnosis and provides information to the clinicians regarding the treatment plan and allow them to set treatment goals. It includes provisions to cater to ad hoc queries from the database for customized reporting and to save the report settings for future use. It provides the ability to import / export data from Clinipac-based systems and other medical systems across the national network.

There are also provisions for a designated system administrator to create users and user groups and control the access of information. The system is primarily meant to cater the requirements for In-Patient Center / Skilled Nursing facilities / Home health services / Managed care organizations - administrators, social workers and clinical department personnel (Physiatrists, Therapists and Nurses) and University research fellows.

This project was undertaken for a large healthcare group in California and was developed over a period of 24 months.