21st Century Informatics:Healthcare not Global, but Local and Sensitive

By CR Team
Monday, June 17, 2013

Vasukumar Nair, Director – Marketing & Sales, 21st Century Informatics

The Indian healthcare sector is increasingly adopting interoperability and standardisation of healthcare technology, yet slow decision-making and low-budget allocation from the providers pose as the key challenges. The industry is still struggling with the lack of awareness on advantages of IT automation. Not consider IT as an enabler to improve organisational performance reflects in their IT budget allocation. In this challenging environment, 21st Century Informatics (21CI), a global healthcare informatics solutions company, is addressing these issues by providing transformative solutions that improve the availability, accessibility and affordability of healthcare services.

21CI offers innovative healthcare informatics solutions used by healthcare service providers such as hospitals, diagnostic centers and speciality clinics among others. Their innovative offerings of Healthcare Information System, Clinic Information System, Laboratory Information System, Advanced Imaging System, and Electronic Medical Records are process driven, professionally made with input from practicing clinicians and are open to make the system 'tailor-made' for different sub specialities. Today, the company serves more than 500 sites and their experience has helped them offer a global perspective to the Indian healthcare industry that is slowly opening the doors for automation. Through their constant effort, 21CI is able to convince their customers and implement internationally accepted SOPS & best practices in the areas that they automate.

"Since we serve the emerging markets, we find a mix of new technologies that are already being used or are in development. Domain oriented areas such as EMR with Clinical Decision Support Systems has satisfactorily penetrated in some countries," says Vasukumar Nair, Director-Marketing & Sales, 21st Century Informatics. 21CI is currently working on additional areas such as patient kiosks, doctor’s tablets and personalised performance dashboards for the top management for a couple of their new HIS projects.

Several Indian hospitals are gearing up to accept the reasonable value for good systems. But their experience with low quality and low-priced applications systems claiming to be HIS or HMS to earn some quick business tends to confuse them. However, 21CI thinks that the hospitals deserve better products and innovative solutions and strives to bring further innovations to their products and services to match the changing requirements of their customers. They are selective in the Indian market and make sure that the company gets into the right place, where the people value their knowledge, best practices, domain and methodologies.

Since markets are in the early stage of growth, 21CI is also actively involved in developing new products and improving the scope of their current products to empower the entire value chain of Healthcare Business Software Application IT lifecycle. 21CI looks forward to become a global leader in providing best-in-class-innovative products and solutions to their customers, developed and implemented by a team of inspired Centurions.

Disclaimer: This article was published in CIO Review Magazine's June 2013 issue. The article can also be assed through the following link. All products and brand names mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. All Trademarks remain the property of their respective holders, and in no way indicates any relationship between 21st Century Informatics B.V or its associates and the holders of said trademarks. CIO Review is owned by CIO Review, Bangalore.

Embracing healthcare software applications

Vasukumar Nair, Director – Marketing & Sales, 21st Century Informatics

What were some of the key challenges that the Health IT sector faced in 2012?
21st Century Informatics has achieved a few good orders in 2012. For these customers, we are providing solutions ranging from end-to-end hospital information systems to a multi-centred chain of enterprise level solutions. We have leveraged our domain expertise acquired through the last 18 years and continue to provide a scalable, affordable and reliable Hospital Information System. However, the key challenges continue to be slow decision-making and low-budget allocation from the providers’ side. I think there is still lack of awareness on advantages of IT automation and they don’t consider IT as an enabler to improve organisational performance. Finally this will reflect in low IT budgets allocated and sometimes lack of support during the time implementation and that has to be certainly changed.

What changes you have noticed in healthcare in the year 2012 in areas like Health IT, Medical Equipment, Regulations etc? 
One of the few areas that we call ‘happening’ in India is healthcare. We found a lot of stakeholders such as service providers, regulatory bodies, software providers becoming very active and we believe they are the driving forces for that positive happening. In 2012 we participated in a few healthcare events and we found that the industry is talking about interoperability and standardisation. Advanced healthcare applications definitely require reliable and secured interoperable standards. Another factor is that standardisation of a healthcare process needs to be in place, which can also promote better regulation.

What are the prospects of growth for the health IT market in 2013? 
Whether it is green fields or expansion of hospitals, or chain of general clinics, speciality clinics – all components of the Indian healthcare, irrespective of their size, are rapidly embracing healthcare software applications and we are seeing a healthy demand for our solutions. Definitely, there are some new healthcare projects coming up and also many in the expansion mode. There will be a need of healthcare IT applications for these new ventures.

We are constantly innovating to provide new features and functionality to our users. We are working on a new technology platform that enables rapid expansion of functionality during IT products implementation.

Please tell us about some new and innovative solutions/technologies that you are planning to introduce in 2013? 
We are constantly innovating to provide new features and functionality to our users. We are working on a new technology platform that enables rapid expansion of functionality during IT products implementation. It is supported by advancement in cloud computing technology and emergence of the SaaS model. We are hoping that by mid of 2013, we would be able to launch this for our customers.

What are the top technologies in healthcare that will play crucial role in the year 2013 and beyond? 
There are many technology trends in the market. Whether it is Cloud, Analytics, Big data, the technology is here to stay, but I do not believe that the mid market healthcare organisations have yet taken full advantage of it. I am sure; they can capitalise these emerging technologies and attain competitive advantage.