Manish Gupta,
CIO
Fortis Healthcare Ltd.
“Intranet works better by word of mouth”
With 14-odd hospitals and 2,200 beds across the length and breadth of the country, Fortis is one of the fastest-growing healthcare providers. Its target -- 40 hospitals by 2010 – is not at all modest by any benchmarks. Working behind-the-scenes making ‘operations’ and procedures smooth through technology is the CIO Manish Gupta. Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Sanjay Gupta and Faiz Askari:
What are the top technical challenges you face currently?
One of our big challenges is to integrate two separate Hospital Management Systems (HMSs), which are fundamentally different. One is a home-grown administrative system to ensure that the patients are properly admitted and discharged and the other is a world-class third-party clinical system called MedTrak (from TrakHealth, a subsidiary of Australia-based InterSystems Corp.). Another challenge is to make our hospitals as paperless as possible through better print management and removal of unnecessary paper-based processes.
You had started on a comprehensive initiative with Microsoft. How is it going?
We are rolling out our intranet using Microsoft SharePoint for which we have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft. The portal will have company-wide information for employees, information like medical records, some of our HR processes like leave and clearance forms, new hires and induction, among others. Within this year, we intend to have a very rich intranet.
How do you plan to ensure that the portal catches on with people?
Intranet works better by word of mouth rather than by merely launching a software application. We are looking at making the portal more attractive and interactive. The key is how much you want to share and how much you can attract people to share.
Do the doctors take to technology easily?
One of the things I’m trying to do is introduce Tablet PCs to our doctors. I’ve gone to them a few times, showing them how it works and how they can enter information into it conveniently and they are quite enthusiastic about it. Fortunately, doctors are a different kind of breed – they like to play with toys. So if you show them some gadget, they freak out on that. So I’m hoping some of the senior doctors will catch on with the Tablet PCs and then the younger ones will follow suit.
How do you manage IT complexity across 14-odd hospitals?
One way of doing so is to standardize the software and the development process. Over the past one year, I’ve created a software change control team. Any hospital that requires a change in their software will have to go through this central team. The advantage is that we take inputs from other hospitals as well if they want the same change and if most of them concur, and then we implement the change centrally across all hospitals. At the same time, if only one or two hospitals want to change, say, the check-out time for applying room rents, we can do that. Such a centralized mode of operation keeps our workload minimized and our tasks streamlined.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
I’m into many creative things. This includes networking with film-makers, journalists and designers and trying my hand at script writing. I’m also an active member of IIT Delhi’s alumni association.
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