Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute and Research Center (RGCI), which treats about 30,000 patients every year, is undergoing a major transformation. Its shelves will now be empty and the office boy will have the leisure of sipping an extra cup of coffee.

RGCI is heading towards a paperless office with its new IT project entitled TRANSCEND (Transformation of Service Effectiveness and Delivery). TRANSCEND is an integrated programme for patient care and service delivery effectiveness across the hospital. While all clinical functions are already automated, other functions such as OPD and IPD activities, billing etc are set to become paperless in the next few months.

The problem that was

Delivering care for cancer patients involves several interventions such as regular consultations in the OPD, Diagnostics and Radiation therapy. “Patient care records are currently maintained in a single physical file containing notes, prescriptions, test results etc. Multiple care providers are involved over a period of time, and structured data from files is not readily available,” says Sundareshan, CFO, RGCI.

As with most super-specialty hospitals, the data available is in paper form. Since no standard is followed, the data captured is inconsistent across multiple departments. This makes the data unsuitable for research or analysis.

“TRANSCEND addresses the business problem of making information readily available to the care provider so that there is effective patient care.

Second, the software provides an evolving framework for incorporating, disseminating and sharing best practices across clinicians and paramedical staff.

This IT project ensures that hospital management activities are automated towards being less paper-intensive and more efficient. This will bring down the overall cost of patient care,” says Sharath Hangal, Principal Consultant of eGestalt and RGCI Programme Manager. Technology services provider eGestalt Technologies has helped RGCI in rolling out this initiative.

Implementation Challenges

Given the fact that this was the first hospital to have complete integrated clinical and business functions, there were several items that needed to be re-engineered to fit the paperless model. “Technical integration and seamless working of different software across multiple business processes and clinical protocols was a major challenge,” informs Hangal.

Since clinical teams across the country—doctors, nurses, and OT wards—were not familiar with IT, the team embarked on a major training exercise. This involved providing the staff with basic training and even creating customized user interfaces to encourage adoption among users.