IT Planning in Hospital Planning!

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Read TG Hospital Planning Framework on slideshare: https://www.slideshare.net/PankajGupta9/tgi-hospital-planning 
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Yesterday I had a meeting with a hospital planner who is planning the expansion of a super specialty Govt hospital in Delhi.

He wanted to get a consultant to plan the cables/routers/switches/LAN/WAN for the hospital. I lost the battle of convincing him that - the cable/router/switch/LAN/WAN design depends on the hardware infrastructure requirements, that in turn depends on the medical devices and software application portfolio. In other words Hospital IT portfolio is extremely inter-dependent and it is self-defeating to plan the Hospital's cables/routers/switches/LAN/WAN components in isolation.

He couldnt understand that the Lab, Radiology, Cath lab, Oncology, Laproscopic OT etc will need redundancy and additional capacity in terms of cables/routers/switches. We need to calculate the average and peak load for each Dept. and then design the cables/routers/switches/LAN/WAN as per that. Whereas typical cable vendors dont know how to calculate transaction loads in Hospitals. For example bulk uploading of Lab results needs a network capacity that is far beyond the regular. LAN/WAN design will also depend on weather you want any wi-fi in wards and selected patient areas or whole hospital. 

Someone needs to decide if all the servers will will be located locally or in a remote data centre. Considering the performance issues, it is better to have the imaging servers located locally. Need to plan for a local server room and network cabinets on every floor because Smart hubs/switches/routers need a server room environment. Further someone needs to have a back-up and disaster recovery plan. The cables/routers/switches/LAN/WAN design is dependent on many such considerations. It is never a cake walk as he assumed it to be!

The industry doesnt have any single vendor that has all the consultants in one team. The only way is to have a Healthcare-IT 'Principle Consultant' that can assemble a team of functional, software, hardware infrastructure and cabling consultants for planning the entire IT Roadmap for the Hospital.

I have seen some hospitals in GCC region [without taking names] that have very high adoption of IT systems by the end-users coupled with JCI Accreditation with minimal non-compliance. These are an indication of IT integrated into Hospital process and design. 

India needs Health Information Exchange for Universal Healthcare

Universal Healthcare by nature of the word Universal cant be done without public and private sector healthcare providers and payers coming together on the same platform. Essentially this platform has to be an IT platform because no paper model or human brain can process so much data and still keep it accurate across the board. India needs an health information exchange [HIE] to enable Universal Healthcare dream. The HIE must have Registries for Identity management of patients, doctors, facilities and payers. Somehow the public and private sector decision makers fails to understand this simple fact. Or shall I say that people born before 1960 have a severe disability and prejudice towards anything to do with technology. Unfortunately it is this generation that is in the decision making positions today. I guess we have to wait another 10-15 years before new blood can replace these old hags and make some better decisions for Universal healthcare. Until then the Health of Indian citizens will continue to suffer. God save us if an epidemic or pandemic was to strike in the meantime. Worse - India will be sitting duck, caught napping if a CBRN disaster happens.