Medanta – The Medicity is one of India’s largest
multi-super specialty institutes and it is located in Gurgaon.
Founded by eminent cardiac surgeon, Dr Naresh Trehan, the
institution has been envisioned with the aim of bringing to India
the highest standards of medical care along with clinical research,
education and training.
Spread across 43 acres, the institute includes a research
center, medical and nursing school; it has six centers of
excellence. Medanta has infrastructure for up to 1,500 beds and
currently offers 800 beds. This includes 350 critical care beds and
45 operation theatres catering to over 20 specialties.
Medanta offers high-end medical care in multiple medical
specialties that include cardiology, cardio-surgery, neurology,
orthopedic, organ transplant (liver and kidney), high-end cancer
care, and several other modalities of treatment.
In the healthcare sector employees are the most critical assets
and also one of the largest components of costs. Hence, right since
its inception, Medanta realized the importance of having a
real-time visibility into the workforce that needs to work 24x7.
For Medanta, it was critical to make sure that the right set of
people were available at the right place and the right time.
The typical manpower ratio in a hospital is 1:5 or 1:6 (five to
six employees per bed) but at Medanta it is 1: 8. There are 5,600
employees working from a single location, and after commissioning
the remaining beds this number is expected to touch 9,000 to
10,000.
"We wanted to offer high-end medical care that is rare in this
part of the world. We realized that people, their skills and
knowledge are crucial to offer these services. In healthcare there
is no tomorrow -- if a person has a heart attack you need to attend
to that person immediately. Therefore in order to offer people
real-time services it was crucial to offer the right skills at the
right point of time in all corners of the hospital, in all
specialties and modalities. That called for a very productive
system. People with right skills should be available and working
efficiently. Since people in India are not willing to spend for
quality healthcare, we also wanted to keep our costs to the
minimum," said Arun Datta, Senior Vice President-HR, Medanta
Medicity.
A little over two years ago, Medanta began scouting for a
workforce solution that was robust (low failure rate), scalable and
cost effective. The solution had to ensure the availability of
people with the right skills, at the right time (24 hours), in any
corner of the hospital. Medanta was looking for a real-time
attendance system that fulfilled all these needs. And it opted for
the Workforce management system from Kronos.
"There were two or three other solutions that we evaluated, but
opted for Kronos as it is an end-to-end solution. Other solutions
either did not have analytics or did not offer hardware-software
integration. We were looking for a solution that could withstand
very intensive use. When you have 4,000 employees checking-in
imagine the chaos caused due to system failure," said Datta.
Implementation
The system was implemented in eight weeks and Medanta claims
there were no major issues. The institute is using Kronos 4500
terminals. The ATM-like terminals act as an employee login
and enable all staff to avail of employee self services. To keep
the load factor in check Medanta classified all the terminals into
three groups. Details of say 2,000 staff lie on a particular group
of terminals. But there is restricted access to some
information.
"Since employee data is spread over different terminals it
reduces the queuing. Secondly, it enables an employee to check his
data from a particular terminal. So an employee does not have to go
to HR or use an employee self service (portal) to figure out if his
punch has registered. This can be verified on the terminal itself,"
said Datta.
Business Benefits
Post implementation, the benefits realized are largely
qualitative and it is largely about skills optimization. Kronos HR
officials feel the objective of streamlining the availability of
people with the right skills, at the right time has been met.
"One of the advantages of this system is that it addresses a
wide variety of skills, multiple levels of people, and it also
offers real-time attendance data," said Datta. "We have information
about how many nurses, technicians and doctors are working in a
particular ward at any point of time. This enables us to provide
the highest quality of services."
After implementing workforce management system from Kronos,
we have information about how many nurses, technicians and doctors
are working in a particular ward at any point of time. This enables
us to provide the highest quality of services
Arun Datta, Senior Vice President-HR, Medanta Medicity
So what's next for Medanta?
Datta informed us that Medanta has also implemented the Kronos
Workforce Scheduling tool and will next implement the Advanced
Scheduling tool.
Well, this is a lesson in quality assurance from the healthcare
industry. Here's a single end-to-end solution that can ensure a
high degree of services (and save many more lives too) -- just by
ensuring that people with the right skills are available at the
right place and at the right time.