Envisioning Intelligent Healthcare -an exclusive coverage of eHealth India 2009: October 2009 Issue

Perot Systems bags IT contract of Max Healthcare

Amrita inistitute of Medical Sciences gets NABH

A Monthly Magazine on Healthcare ICTs, Technologies & Applications Vo lu m e 4 | I s s ue 10 | OC TOBER 2009 | I SSN 0973- 8959

I N R 75 / U SD 10

Envisioning Intelligent Healthcare An exclusive coverage of eHealth India 2009, 25-27 August, HICC, Hyderabad PAGE 8

eINDIA 2009 Award Winners ProďŹ ling of eINDIA 2009 Awardees PAGE 14

Event Report: CII Health Insurance Summit Enhancing Consumer Experience in Health Insurance PAGE 37

Tech Trends: Information Technology Vital for Chronic Disease Management Dr. Pankaj Raina, Healthcare Industry Consultant, VitalHealth Software PAGE 38

Perspective: Indian Healthcare and Information Technology Anju Chawla Takkar, Group Project Manager, Infosys Technologies Ltd PAGE 40

w w w .ehe a l th o n l i n e. o r g

Envisioning Intelligent Healthcare an exclusive coverage of eHealth India 2009

CONTENTS w w w . e h e a l t h o n l i n e . o r g | volume 4 | issue 10 | October 2009

8

COVER STORY Envisioning Intelligent Healthcare an exclusive coverage of eHealth India 2009

14

eINDIA 2009 AWARD WINNERS

Profiling of eINDIA 2009 Awardees

37

EVENT REPORT

CII Health Insurance Summit: Enhancing Consumer Experience in Health Insurance

38

TECH TRENDS

Information Technology Vital for Chronic Disease Management Dr. Pankaj Raina, Healthcare Industry Consultant, VitalHealth Software

40

PERSPECTIVE

Indian Healthcare and Information Technology Anju Chawla Takkar, Group Project Manager, Infosys Technologies Ltd

42

REGULAR SECTIONS

News

4

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

ISSN 0973-8959

Can we help make the Hospital Paperless?

Certainly!

Post Jobs Online for FREE @

www.ehealthonline.org Now a CAREER section specifically for professionals in eHealth, Health IT, Bio-medical Engineering, Medical Technologies, Medical Electronics, Telemedicine, Tele-health, Healthcare Operations and Administration.

Employers can now give specific details for the positions available & Job Seekers too can finally get a clearer picture of what jobs are on offer for them.

Get a clutter-free picture of the healthcare job market!!!

Get clicking on www.ehealthonline.org/careers to get started.

6

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

EDITORIAL Volume 4 | Issue 10 | October 2009

P RESI DENT

Dr. M P Narayanan E D ITOR-IN-CHIEF

Dr. Ravi Gupta P RO D U CT MA NA G ER

Dipanjan Banerjee mobile: +91-9968251626 email: dipanjan@ehealthonline.org P RINCIP AL CORRESPONDENT

Divya Chawla email: divya@ehealthonline.org S R. CO RRESPONDENT

Harsha Chawla email: harsha@ehealthonline.org

Celebration of ‘e’xcellence Last month we had our fifth annual Indian ICT event – ‘eINDIA 2009’, at the magnificent Hyderabad International Convention Centre.

Acclaimed as one of the largest ICT event in the country (with five thematic conferences on eGovernance, eEducation, eHealth, eAgriculture and Telecentres, along with a fullblown exhibition) it drew more than 3500 participants and visitors from across the country and beyond. A plethora of activities ranging from keynote speeches, panel discussions, roundtables, workshops and technology showcase filled the three days to the brim …but for sure, nobody was complaining!

S ALE S & MA RKETI NG

Arpan Dasgupta Executive Officer - Business Development mobile: +91-9911960753, +91-9818644022 email: arpan@ehealthonline.org Bharat Kumar Jaiswal Sr. Executive - Business Development mobile: +91-9971047550 email: bharat@ehealthonline.org S R GRAP HI C DESIG NER

Bishwajeet Kumar Singh GRAP H I C DESIG NER

Om Prakash Thakur WEB

Zia Salahuddin

Enthusiastic participation of speakers and audience alike made for a great rendezvous at the conference halls, while the expo was a teeming with visitors looking for the latest that technology can offer.

For those who couldn’t join us in this technological revelry, we bring you an exclusive and exhaustive report of what came out of this event and how the practitioners and industry experts are charting the path of future development of ehealth in India. eINDIA 2009 also recognised some of the best projects, initiatives and practitioners of ICT-driven development across government, education, healthcare, agriculture and rural sectors, through the ‘eINDIA 09 Awards’. With the purpose of bringing better transparency and fairness in the award process, we introduced two categories under each award segment, namely, the ‘jury awards’ and the ‘public opinion awards’ (through online voting). We were delighted by the overwhelming response for the online public poll - a whooping 14,000+ votes. Look into this issue for a detailed report of our awards ceremony, along with a brief profile of each awardees.

S U BS CRIP TIONS & CIRCULA TION

Manoj Kumar (+91- 9891752931) manoj@ehealthonline.org ED ITO RIAL CORRESPONDENCE

eHEALTH G-4 Sector 39, NOIDA 201301, India tel: +91-120-2502180-85 fax: +91-120-2500060

Make sure you fill in your nomination next year.

I’ll be unfair if I don’t acknowledge our sponsors, supporting partners and delegates who actually helped the event to become what it is. I extend my sincere appreciation and gratitude for their support in this endeavor and look forward to work again in many such initiatives in future.

email: info@ehealthonline.org does not neccesarily subscribe to the views expressed in this publication. All views expressed in the magazine are those of the contributors. The magazine is not responsible or accountable for any loss incurred, directly or indirectly as a result of the information provided. is published by Elets Technomedia PVt. Ltd in technical collaboration with Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies (CSDMS).

Dr. Ravi Gupta Owner, Publisher, Printer - Ravi Gupta.

Printed at Print Explorer 553, Udyog Vihar, Phase-V, Gurgaon, Haryana, INDIA and published from 710 Vasto Mahagun Manor, F-30, Sector - 50, Noida, UP Editor: Dr. Ravi Gupta

Ravi.Gupta@ehealthonline.org

October 2009

7

EVENT REPORT

“Envisioning Intelligent Healthcare” An Exclusive Coverage of eHealth India 2009 25-27 August 2009

Hyderabad International Convention Centre, Hyderabad

e

India 2009 was held during 25-27 August 2009 at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre, Hyderabad. eHealth India 2009 was one of the five tracks, at the event, that attracted participants and delegates including industry stalwarts, policy makers, academicians, researchers, technology vendors and stakeholders from India as well as overseas. The three day conference highlighted the key aspects in the health IT arena and proved to be an excellent platform for sharing knowledge and discussing pertinent issues.

Day 1 The opening address at the eHealth track, delivered by Dr. Ajit K Nagpal, ChairmanExecutive Council, Batra Hospital & Medical Research Institute, focused on “Transforming Healthcare Systems & Services: An ICT-centric Approach”. Dr. Nagpal stated that owing to the unique character of the healthcare industry, it is extremely challenging for IT industry to implement ICT technologies for the enhancement of technical efficiency, quality and delivery of healthcare. He highlighted certain challenges that the IT industry may face. These include: provision of fully functional clinical desktops for care providers, handsfree solutions, rules-driven user-interface, knowledge-based and protocol-driven clinical support system, appointment list on handheld devices, virtual and secure access of information, high speed internet connectivity and electronic records for secure access to information.

8

October 2009

D Purandeswari, Minister of State for Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource and Development, Government of India, inaugurating the eIndia 2009 event along with (L-R) Charles Clarke, Member of Parliament, Former Home and Education Secretary, Former Minister, United Kingdom; MP Narayanan, President, CSDMS and Dr. Rajashekharan Pillai, Vice Chancellor, Indira Gandhi National Open University

The opening address was followed by the first session of the conference, which was based on the theme— “Envisioning Healthcare Reforms – Role of Information and Communication Technologies”.

The speakers of this session made excellent presentations that were highly informative.

Dr. Girdhar J Gyani, Secretary General, Quality Council of India and CEO, NABH stated that ICT and accreditation are complimentary to each other. While accreditation for enhancement of quality is extremely important, the major challenge remains to design an

www.ehealthonline.org

appropriate IT platform for bringing in quality in healthcare procedures.

Dr. Shakti K Gupta, Professor and Head, Department of Hospital Administration, AIIMS, blamed the dearth of IT spending in the healthcare sector in India. Dr. Gupta stated that large corporate hospitals in India spend less that one percent on IT, while hospitals in the west spend somewhere around three percent. According to him the major challenges in the proliferation of ICT in India is the lack of enough government initiatives and spending and low computer-literacy in the government as well as private

EVENT REPORT sector. Enhanced implementation will require continual incentives and benefits for the users.

People Speak

Surgeon Rear Admiral (Retd.) Dr. VK Singh said that the need of the hour is to be able to provide quality healthcare at affordable cost and the battle is won if implementation of ICT helps in doing this. He pointed out several challenges to this such as trusted network, interactive systems and integration of different system components.

You all are doing a great job. You are consistent in delivering excellent performance.

Thanks for inviting me for the session.

- A. Vijayarajan, CEO, Clintics

Importance of use of mobile technologies was another topic of discussion in the first session. Uday Bhaskarwar, Vice President of Infosys Technologies stressed on leveraging mobile technologies as mobile has always been the most pervasive medium of communication and the upcoming reliable 4G technology can be a very effective communication medium.

Dr. V Balusubramanyam, Domain Consultant-Medical E-Learning and Professor, Department of Anatomy, St. John’s Medical College, was of the view that resistance to change has impeded the proliferation of ICT in healthcare and doctors are probably the most resistant to change. While a change of mindset is required to make this happen, the new generation can be looked upon for bringing the IT revolution. The last presentation of this session was made by Dr. P K Amarnath Babu from HMIS Project, who spoke about the HMIS project and how it has overcome the challenges that were posed during its implementation. The session, overall, was able to put light on the key factors and challenges that need to be looked upon for implementation of ICT in the Indian healthcare sector.

An insight into the Aarogyasri Healthcare Trust was provided by Babu Ahmed who is the CEO of this program. One

Congratulations on organising what appeared to be an outstanding conference.

- Prof. K Ganapathy, President, Apollo Telemedicine Networking Foundation It was a good eye opening event.

- Manu Jain, Director, BAFNA Healthcare Pvt. Ltd., Faridabad I am happy to inform you that the event was well organised and I hope it has generated sufficient academic industry interaction and generated new business synergies. Congratulation to the entire organising team.

- Dr. V. Balasubramanyam, Domain Consultant, Medical E-Learning & Professor, Dept of Anatomy, St. John’s Medical College, Bangalore Congratulations on making the eHealth India 2009 conference flawless. I appreciate the massive amount of hard work put into organising such a large conference. The conference was very professionally organized and I did not hear even a single person complaining or grumbling about anything relating to the organization during the entire three days. Some presentations were going behind schedule but then the speakers were to blame for that.

- Dr. Karanvir Singh, Head-Medical Informatics & Consultant surgeon, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, New Delhi Please accept my congratulations for the excellent arrangement over the three days of the event. I think it was very well organised and managed.

- Sridhar D, Sr. Manager-Sales, SG Technologies Pvt. Ltd. It was indeed a great pleasure to participate in eHealth India ‘09 conference at Hyderabad. I would like to convey my thanks to the organisers for their hospitality and to resource personnel for sharing their professional thoughts and high level deliberations; and also the exhibitors for introducing me to their quality products.

Looking forward to regular professional interactions.

- Wg Cdr (Dr) Sanjeev Sood, Station Medicare Centre, Air Force StationRatanada, Jodhpur, Rajasthan Thank you very much for inviting me as a speaker in eHealth India 2009. I must appreciate and congratulate the entire team for organising this event. Everything was professionally planned and arranged. Keep it up.

- Dr Pradeep Bhardwaj, COO, Ojjus Medicare Group I am very impressed with the quality of articles and ideas presented at the conference. It was a great pleasure to get to know about many eHealth applications developed by various software companies. The recognition the professionals gave to our project ‘Vidusuwa’ is overwhelming. eHealth India 2009 was indeed a great success and I look forward to participating next year. Congratulations and good luck for future events.

- Dr. Shiromi Arunatileka, Senior Lecturer, University of Colombo School of Computing, Sri Lanka It was an excellent opportunity to participate in eHealth India 09 event at Hyderabad.

The event facilitated to gain industry insights through knowledge sharing sessions and networking with key stakeholders.

- Gowthaman, Honeywell

October 2009

9

EVENT REPORT

People Speak Many thanks for the invitation to participate in the eHealth India 2009.

It was a very well organized and well attended event, and I wish to compliment the organising team for the success - Dr. Ajit K Nagpal, ChairmanExecutive Council, BHMRC All the sessions were quite interactive and very informative. I thoroughly enjoyed being a part of the event.

- Vamsee Priya, Executive - Corporate Communications, LGS Global Ltd. It was a well organised event. We were able to generate some contacts and visibility in the marketplace through this event.

- Ravi Paladugu, Director, Verudix Congratulations to the team of eHealth magazine for successfully organising the event yet another time. Every year the quality of the sessions is going up and we do appreciate the opportunity to be part of this prestigious annual event.

- Raghu Raman, Amrita Technologies Congratulations on making eHealth India 2009 a success.

- Dr Ruchi Dass, Business Head, Kayaguru Health Solutions eHEALTH India 2009 created a fantastic platform where various stakeholders of the healthcare industry were able to get together and exchange strategic information. As a healthcare ICT organisation, our take-aways from eHealth India 2009 were immense, including a first hand understanding of the direction in which the healthcare industry is moving. We greatly appreciate the organizers of the event, and wish them great success for future events. Well done!

- Subramaniyan, CEO - ezEMRx India I thought that the attendance was better than the 2008 event and more knowledgeable. The quality of speakers and discussion topics too were better. All in all, a commendable job, for sure.

- Dr. S. B. Bhattacharyya, Vice President (Clinical Services), Karishma Software Ltd.

10

October 2009

of the key programs launched by the Government, Aarogyasri implements IT in a big way to provide health services to several BPL families in Andhra Pradesh.

He also stated that IT has to be a part of any mass scheme that is planned.

coming up with several newer technologies in this domain, such as finger printing, PDA computer on wheels and so on.

The second session comprised of speakers from the government as well as the private sector to discuss “Opportunities and Best Practices in eHealth Adoption – A Multi-stakeholder Perspective”.

Divya Sehgal, Chief Operating Officer, Apollo Health Street Ltd., delivered a special address on “ICT best practices for excellence in modern hospital operations”. Talking about innovation as the immediate need, Divya stressed on limitation of infrastructure, access, affordability, quality and research, manpower and demand management as the major factors curtailing growth.

Apollo’s initiative, The Health Hiway platform, aims to have a centralised patient-centric architecture and become the main platform for the industry. The platform uses SaaS to capture most electronic transactions and sets uniform standards.

Pravin Srivastava, Director (Stats), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India, talked about the development of the portal www. nrhm-mis.nic.in, which is a dedicated web-based data capturing system.

The portal has helped in completely eliminating paper reports under the NRHM and integrating health related information across various programs.

Dr. Balaji Utla, CEO, HMRI talked about HMRI’s service – 104 Advice, which, with the implementation of IT, helps in providing crucial health information through phone to various people across the state of Andhra Pradesh.

Dr. K. Ganapathy put light on the initiatives of Apollo Telemedicine Networking Foundation, a private sector entity’s role in the provision of telemedicine services to the rural population. Highlighting the eHealth initiatives in India, Bhudeb Chakravarti, General Manager, National Institute of Smart Government, talked about the recent trends and key issues in the integration of IT and healthcare.

Going forward, Dr. Sanjay Bijwe, Project Director and OSD (HMIS Project), Dept. of Medical Education and Drugs, Govt. of Maharashtra, talked about the HMIS project for medical colleges, which is currently being implemented and will be completed by 2010 end.

Government of Maharashtra is

www.ehealthonline.org

Day 2

The first session on day two, was chaired by Surgeon Rear Admiral (Retd.) Dr. VK Singh and focused on “Technologies for Clinical Excellence and Business Efficiency of Hospitals”. The key speakers of this session included: Dr. Karanvir Singh, Consultant Surgeon and HeadMedical Informatics, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital; Dr. Srinivas K Iyengar, Vice President, Care Hospitals; and Rahul Chatterjee, Head-Healthcare Vertical, Siemens Information Systems Ltd. The discussions focused on implementation of IT at the hospital level. Dr. Karanvir Singh and Dr. Iyenger talked about the implementation of TrakCare system and Karishma Software’s HIS system respectively at their hospitals to bring in the IT component for automation of various procedures.

Being a vendor of the technology, Rahul Chatterjee, presented a case study of deployment of Siemens’ IT solutions at MedCentral in the USA. A special keynote address was delivered

Thank You Sponsors, Exhibitors & Participants for Making 2009

A GRAND SUCCESS PLATINUM SPONSORS

ASSOCIATE SPONSORS

REGISTRATION COUNTER CO-SPONSOR

empowering education... enabling careers

eHEALTH EXIHIBITORS

OFFICIAL HEALTH IT PARTNER

GOLD SPONSORS

HEALTH TECHNOLOGY PARTNER

LANYARD SPONSOR

eHEALTH SUPPORTING PARTNERS

HEALTH TRANSFORMATION PARTNER

SILVER SPONSOR

DELEGATE KIT SPONSOR

KNOWLEDGE PARTNERS

EVENT REPORT

by Iain Bray from the strategic planning group of InterSystems Corporation.

He compared various systems installed at Sweden, Brazil and Chile and highlighted the benefits of all these systems. He also talked about the core eHealth policies of these countries.

Technologies for clinical excellence and business efficiency of hospitals were discussed by the vendor community including Srikanth Muthya, General Manager (Healthcare IT), GE Healthcare; Satish Kini, Chief Mentor, 21st Century Healthcare Management Solutions; and Dr. Suman Bhusan Bhattacharya, VP-Clinical Services, Karishma Software.

Srikanth Muthya talked about providing solutions for eHealth and how can technology serve for clinical excellence and business efficiency of hospitals.

According to him, the two areas of expertise that can help in doing this include intra-operability and evidencebased medicine.

Satish Kini highlighted three major factorstechnology, processes and people and said that the much needed efficiencies in healthcare require innovative approach and technologies.

Dr. SB Bhattacharyya said that technologies for clinical excellence and business efficiencies of hospitals has mainly two takeaways: dashboard and requirement management. According to him, the latest innovation in clinical IT is clinical transformation, which is not a technology based tool but involves implementation management.

Setting an excellent example, UK Ananthapadmanabhan, President of the Kovai Medical Centre and Hospital (KMCH), Coimbatore, talked

12

October 2009

about the integration of technology in various processes at KMCH and how it has invariably helped them in improving efficiency and quality of their services. The third session of the day was an interactive session on “Health IT Leaders’ Forum— Mainstreaming IT in Indian Hospitals”.

In addition to the moderator, Sandeep Sinha, Deputy Director-Healthcare (South Asia & ME), Frost and Sullivan, the discussion comprised of eight other speakers—Dr. Karanvir Singh; UK Ananthapadmanabhan; Dr. Srinivas K Iyenger; Manish Gupta, CIO, HCG Enterprises; Vishnu Gupta, CIO, Calcutta Medical Research Institute; Dr. M Venugopal, SDN Hospital; and BS Ganesh Babu, Aravind Eye Care System. With all these dignitaries on the dais the discussion successfully brought out the main bottlenecks in the proliferation of IT in the healthcare sector in India and the most probable solutions for these.

Manish Gupta was of the view that there can mainly be two approaches for mainstreaming IT budget in hospitals.

First is to keep the baseline budget lean and utilize the extra finances for new initiatives. Another approach is to first build a P&L and keep IT as a component in it.

The last keynote address of the day was delivered by Wg. Cdr. (Dr.) Sanjeev Sood, Sr. Medical Officer and Aviation Medicine Specialist, Indian Air Force.

Talking about computerised physician order entry (CPOE), Dr. Sood highlighted the various benefits of installing a CPOE system, which include—prevention of medication errors, reduction of prescription dosage errors and keeping physicians updated.

He also discussed several other major advantages of CPOE such as increasing efficiency, reducing practice variations, giving clinicians a broad access to clinical literature and reducing the length of stay of the patient in the hospital, among others.

www.ehealthonline.org

Chaired by A Vijayrajan, Chief Executive Officer, Clinitics, the last session of the day focused on standards, best practices and solutions in creating a seamless healthcare ecosystem.

Eminent speakers of the session—Dr. Dinesh Jain, Medical Informatics Specialist, Max Healthcare; Vamsi C Kasivajalla, Executive DirectorHealthcare, Sobha Renaissance IT; Inderjith Davalur, CEO, Aosta Software Technologies; Prasenjit Kundu, COO, Health Hiway and Subramaniam, Director, ezEMRx, brought forward the most viable solutions to create a healthcare ecosystem in India.

According to Inderjit Davalur, as of today, USA is the only country that takes medical care to a more aggressive level and India also needs to gear up now. Therefore it has become imperative for all organizations to have a proper system in place.

Vamsi Kasivajalla was of the view that a huge amount of duplication is happening in the healthcare industry because of non-implementation of IT in the maintainence of reports and urged the government officials to come out with a policy and create some standards that can help prevent this.

Prasenjit Kundu gave a patient-centric view of the ecosystem, which respects the privacy of the patient and is streamlined cost-effective and efficient at the same time. He said that the patient’s journey on the health highway goes through various aspects of the ecosystem leading to multiplicity of data residing in disparate areas.

Subramaniam identified the health ecosystem and the needs of various stakeholders in this ecosystem.

Talking about IT as an enabler, Subramanian

explained various health information technology systems such as EMR/EHR, LIS/RIS, drug information systems, health management systems etc.

Day 3 Day three, began with an interesting keynote address, delivered by Dr. Rathan Kelkar, Director, Kerala IT Mission, Govt. of Kerala. Dr. Kelkar focused on the ‘Dr. SMS’ program, an mHealth application initiated by the Kerala state IT mission for providing assistance in healthcare.

Looking at the rapid evolution of mobile technologies, Dr. Kelkar said that the high penetration and scope for development of mTechnology in health application and health services cannot be ignored. ‘Dr. SMS’ is a round-the-clock service, which acts as a central repository and provides health information through SMS and portal to the people in Kerala.

Going forward on the same lines, the first session of day three also focused on exploring new technologies, service channels and business models for online and mobile applications in healthcare. Some interesting statistics were provided by Rajendra P Gupta, the chairman of the session, such as the number of mobile users in India increasing to about 470 million. Also, compared to internet density of 7 percent, the teledensity is greater than 40 percent, which in itself highlights the huge penetration of mobile services in the country. Speakers from various backgrounds including Nivedan Sahani, VP, Enterprise Services, BhartiAirtel Ltd., KVRK Rao, VP-Strategic Initiatives and Business Intelligence, SG Technologies; Dr. Ruchi Dass, Business Head, Kayaguru Health Solutions; Dr. Shabbir S Abdul, Researcher, National Yang Ming University, Taiwan, and Dinusha Vatsalan from School of Computing, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka; came together and discussed about mHealth’s penetration into the healthcare industry and the change, it has brought about, in the way health services are being offered.

“Considering that Government of India allots 5 percent of GDP for the health sector, there are several opportunities for private players to invest in different areas. Information technology is a major sectors that can attract investments and provide fruitful returns.”

Nivedan Sahani said that there are four aspects to a health ecosystem, which include: the enabler, the government, the doctor and the patient.

Focusing on mHealth, he talked about Airtel’s solution Health MATE deployed under the Aaganvadi Project.

Dr. Rana Mehta, VP-Healthcare Practice, Technopak Advisors, presented his keynote address in the post tea-break session. His presentation revolved around the funding landscapes in the emerging Indian healthcare industry.

Considering that Government of India allots 5 percent of GDP for the health sector, there are several opportunities for private players to invest in different areas including super-specialty hospitals, community hospitals, diagnostic centres and day care surgery centres, among others.

Information technology, medical equipment, consumables, training/ education, medical waste management and hospital architecture and facilities management are all major sectors that can attract investments and provide fruitful returns.

Following the keynote address, was the venture capitalists’ and PE investors’ forum. Vikram Gupta, COO, India Ventures; Manish Gupta; Sateesh

Andara, Venture Partner, Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Yash Shenoy from Invascent; and Monica S Shah from Acumen Fund participated in this session. The discussions in this session centred around appraising investment worthiness among healthcare providers and technology players.

Following the focus of the session, Vikram Gupta talked about India Ventures, which is a Piramal Group funded organisation focusing on healthcare and lifesciences investments across the entire healthcare and lifesciences sector.

A very interesting, postlunch keynote address

by Venkat Changavalli, CEO, GVK-EMRI, kept the conference alive. Highlighting the example of EMRI, Venkat Changavalli talked about how technology can be leveraged for emergency management and healthcare delivery in India.

The developments and best practices for universalising healthcare through technology was the focus of the last session of the conference. Various Indian as well as international speakers including Lt. Col. (Dr.) Salil Garg, Senior Cardiologist at Command Hospital, Pune; Dr. Pradeep Bhardwaj, COO, Ojjus Medicare Group; SG Prasad, Chief of Telemedicine at Care Foundation; Dr. PC Jain, Professor and Head of C-DAC, Noida; and Holger Monnich from university of Karlsruhe, Germany participated in this session and highlighted the technological aspects in the dissemination of health services.

Geared for excellent growth, the future of health IT in India seems to be extremely bright and the eHealth India, every year, is committed to deliver the best platform for knowledge sharing on key aspects in this arena.

With the same motive eHealth will be showcasing eHealth Asia 2009 in Colombo, Sri Lanka from 2-4 December, this year. We hope to see you there!

October 2009

13

J Satyanarayana, Principal Secretary, Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Andhra Pradesh, Chief Guest of eINDIA 2009 Awards Ceremony along with Dr MP Narayanan of CSDMS

eINDIA2009 Awards ceremony was held on 26th August 2009 at Hyderabad International Convention Centre, Hyderabad, India, to felicitate the winners of jury and public choice awards. The awards were conferred to distinguished professionals and institutions working in the domains of: eAgriculture, e-Governance, Digital Learning, e-Health, Municipal IT and Telecentre.

The eINDIA Awards programme was held alongside the eINDIA 2009 conference proceedings. The objective was to encourage institutions and individual leaders to use and apply ICT tools in various developmental and sector-specific projects and to identify and popularise emerging leaders and innovative projects from different sectors of the development community, including the grassroots organisations.

The Award selection process went through a dual process of Jury as well as public voting system. There was a huge response in each Award category in terms of sending nominations and online voting of nominations. We thank our esteemed Jury Panel who had a tough time in selecting the best entries from the huge number of nominations we had received. We also thank the nominees as well as the public for their enormous response to the eINDIA 2009 Awards.

The awards have helped identify and felicitate projects that exemplify the kind of implementation that can be easily replicated and at the same time prove efficient and sustainable, especially projects implemented in India and the South Asian region. It has also helped promote the most innovative initiatives in the domain of ICTs for Development and has spread awareness about the role of ICTs in addressing social concerns.

In this issue of the magazine, we are covering the details of the award winners from different categories.

The information is also available online www.eindia.net. in/2009/awards/eindia2009-awards-winners.asp

14

October 2009

Ashis Sanyal and Prakash Kumar at jury meet

Dr Gopi Ghosh during the award selection process

Dr. Ashok Kumar working on the jury award process

JURY PROCESS The Jury members for each award category were chosen based on their expertise/specialization in the domain.

Jury members who extended their support to us and evaluated the nominations received were Ashis Sanyal, Senior Director, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Government of India; Prakash Kumar, Director, Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), Cisco Systems India; Dr Rajashekharan Pillai, Vice Chancellor, Indira Gandhi National Open University; Ashish Garg, Asia Regional Coordinator, GeSCI, Madhuri Parti, Head, Learn India; Rajen Varada, Resource Person & Moderator ICTD

community, UN Solution Exchange; Dr. Ashok Kumar, DDG & Director, Central Bureau of Health Intelligence, Government of India; Sajan Venniyoor, Country Representative (India), Deutsche Welle; S N Goswami, MD and CEO, Media Lab Asia; Dr. V Balaji, Global Leader, Knowledge Management & Sharing, ICRISAT, Patancheru, Hyderabad and Dr. Gopi Ghosh, Assistant FAO Representative, India.

A Jury Meet was organised on 21st August 2009, in Delhi, with the agenda to: shortlist nominations; finalise results and sign the Jury Decision Form. The Jury members met on the stipulated date, discussed and gave their verdict.

ONLINE VOTING PROCESS

The online voting process started from 1st August 2009 and closed on 20th August 2009. After registering to vote through online filling of some basic personal information such as name, organization, sector, to validate that the voter is genuine, anyone could vote online. We received a whopping 16,788 votes for eINDIA2009 Award Nominations!

The response thus, was overwhelming.

Total votes cast category wise, include: // ICT Enabled Agriculture Initiative of the Year- 1612 // G2C Initiative of the Year- 981 // G2B Initiative of the Year- 891 // G2C Initiative of the Year- 673 // mGov Initiative of the Year- 436 // Civil Society eGov Initiative of the Year1339

www.ehealthonline.org

// ICT Enabled School of the Year- 2446 // ICT Enabled University of the Year-812 // Government/Policy Initiative of the Year in Digital Learning- 601 // Civil Society Digital Learning Initiative of the Year- 713 // ICT Enabled Hospital of the Year- 419 // Government/Policy eHealth Initiative of the Year- 1087 // Civil Society eHealth Initiative of the Year- 268 // Innovative Grassroots Telecentre of the Year- 298 // Civil Society Telecentre Initiative of the Year- 230 // ICT Enabled Municipal Initiative of the Year- 1503

WINNERS - G2C JURY AWARD E-TANSIK e-Tansik is related to the admission to public universities and institutions in Egypt that operates through a centralized office, University Enrollment Co- ordination Office (UEC). This office enrolls over 450,000 students yearly. The purpose of the e-Tansik initiative was to replace the old paper process through a comprehensive webbased application, hosted on the Egyptian Government Portal, that accepts student’s university enrollment application, backed by a 24/7 call center for students’ support. The Portal’s operation team was responsible for service operation, security and technical support. e-Tansik proved to be highly beneficial for both citizens and government. It resulted in huge cost savings, higher efficiency and much better services for the citizens at no cost. In addition, it helped building trust in e-Government services.

The e-Tansik application was developed by the Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University. The team developed the online form and tested the application according to the business rules set by the Ministry of Higher Education for acceptance, taking into account geographical distribution.

Dr Ahmed Mouhmed Tobal, General Manager, Education Project, Ministry of State for Administrative Development, Egypt

• ACHIEVEMENTS • The initiative taken was replacing the paper process by a comprehensive web-based application, hosted on the Egyptian Implementor: Public Universities Enrollment Project, Cairo, Egypt Website: www.egypt.gov.eg

• • • •

Government Portal and supported by a 24/7 call center for student support.

Students are able to access the application with their student IDs and a special PIN code received along with their secondary school certificates.

The online application was offered entirely free of charge.

The automated process allowed extra features over the old paper forms.

It helped build trust in the e-Government services.

A flexible and scalable system design was implemented to allow future consolidation and aggregation.

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD NATIONAL PORTAL OF INDIA that take place through the Portal. Also facilitated through the portal is the key component of citizen participation in the processes and policy formulation by the government as in the case of RTI Complaint and Appeal, Central Pay Commission and NGO Partnership. The Portal has exclusive section dedicated to the citizens, business, overseas, government and know India, sectors.

Neeta Verma, HOD, Data Centre & Web Services Division and Alka Misra, Technical Director, from National Informatics Centre, Delhi

National Portal of India is the official portal for the Government of India. It provides a single window source for alleviating entrée to all information and services that is provided by the various constituents of the Indian Government to its citizens and other stakeholders. The India portal www.india.gov.in, an aggregator of more than 5000 distinct Indian Government websites (of various different domains and owners), has a cohesive interface. The Portal provides a flawless access to a wide variety of services for all Indian citizens, thus acting as a gateway to a superfluity of information and services provided electronically by the different departments of Indian government. The primary objective of e-Government is fulfilled as interaction takes place between the citizen through electronic delivery and exchange of information and services

ACHIEVEMENTS india.gov.in provides a single window gateway to over 5000 • Indian government websites, a feat that is unique in its own right.

The Portal has also proven to be an effective medium for • the participation of common citizens in the process of governance.

Publication of information and documents over the Net, online • delivery of citizen services as well as the facility to know the status of applications submitted for various government services has not only led to benefiting the end-users or common citizens but also fulfills one of the basic objectives of good governance namely enhancing transparency and accountability in the government functioning.

Implementor: National Informatics Centre, New Delhi Website: www.india.gov.in

October 2009

15

WINNERS - G2G JURY AWARD CENTRAL PLAN SCHEME MONITORING SYSTEM The Project envisages tracking of expenditure for more than 1000 central plan schemes of the Government of India having an outlay of approximately Rs 200,000 Crores. The sanction identification process that has been established enables tracking of fund flow under these schemes for various implementing agencies. Accordingly around 70,000 sanctions were captured during the financial year 2008-09.

Expenditure under different components of schemes was captured through expenditure filing on a pilot basis from the lowest level of implementation i.e. village for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and National Child Labour Project in the states of Karnataka (Bangalore-Rural) and Punjab (Ludhiana).

Information on all sanctions issued under the plan schemes for release of funds to various organisations/implementing agencies is available on the system.

ACHIEVEMENTS • At present the central plan scheme monitoring system is under implementation in all the departments of the Government of India, which are implementing the central plan schemes with some exceptions.

Amitabh Tripathi, Deputy Controller General of Accounts

•

•

• Implementor: Controller General of Accounts, Delhi Website: cga.nic.in

The system has stabilised and demonstrates the capabilities to track the funds on the parameters which cannot be captured through existing accounting system. Thus the same model can be replicated in the state governments for tracking of similar plan scheme releases to various organisations.

Tracking of financial sanctions issued by various programme divisions in the ministries and its payment status. Thus it also works as the bill tracking system.

It has provided MIS to top level management for expenditure management.

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD E-LEKHA - A STRIDE TOWARDS A CORE ACCOUNTING SOLUTION General of Accounts (CGA) to update and monitor daily reporting of expenditure and revenue of the Government of India, in sync with the budget allotted to a ministry and its sub units and schemes. This software is positioned at the lowest level of accounting and helps in optimum utilization of financial resources.

Dipankar Sengupta, Technical Director and Punit Srivastava, Senior Systems Analyst from Accounts Informatics Division, Office of Controller General of Accounts, National Informatics Centre

e-Lekha, a prudent financial management application provides an electronic payment and accounting information system for the Civil Accounts Organization of the Government of India with the objective of improving efficiency and accuracy of the accounting process. Built in and around the COMPACT application running at pay and accounts offices and other offline interfaces, it provides a system of core accounting with integration of daily, monthly and annual accounting processes for near real time value added reporting and financial monitoring and control. e-Lekha is being used by all Civil Ministries of the Government of India covering over 400 Pay and accounts offices and 47 ministries /departments. It is developed by the Accounts Informatics Division, National Informatics Centre for the Controller

16

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

ACHIEVEMENTS eLekha is currently operational in all 52 ministries covering • 462 pay and accounts offices of different ministries and Union Territories of the Government of India.

Centralised management and online availability of chart of • accounts of GOI (over 1 Lakh heads of accounts, grants, object head, categories and their interrelationships, over 70 controller codes, over 500 PAO codes and over 6000 DDO codes ).

Full integration of payment and accounting functions.

• Accuracy of Accounts – online validation, no audit qualifications.

• Rejection of erroneous and invalid data at the lowest level maintaining data consistency and integrity at all different accounting tiers.

Data integrity – through a single database at the Controller and • CGA Level and having interfaces with COMPACT at PAO level.

Implementor: Accounts Informatics Division, National Informatics Centre, delhi Website: www.acid.nic.in

WINNERS - G2B JURY AWARD e-BIDDING The Ministry of Finance, Malaysia recently introduced Government electronic procurement mode named eBidding. eBidding was introduced in selected Government agencies on a pilot basis in November 2006 as part of the ePerolehan, solution under the eGovernment initiative. ePerolehan provides a virtual marketplace to cater for Government buyers (2,500 offices with approximately 12,000 users) and suppliers of products and services totalled 140,000 suppliers. There are 5 procurement modes in ePerolehan which are direct purchase, central contract, quotation, tender and eBidding. All of these procurement modes are web-based and can be accessed by users online. eBidding is a procurement mode that is based on a reverse auction concept where sellers offer their items and compete for the price which the buyer will accept. In this scenario, the Government agency, as the buyer will set up an auction event to receive bids from suppliers.

Implementor: ePerolehan, Malaysia Website: www.home.eperolehan.gov.my

ACHIEVEMENTS During the pilot implementation, more than 100 transactions • have been carried out involving 8 Ministries. eBidding drastically reduces end-to-end procurement process • in comparison with other modes of procurement. In average, the procurement cycle is only within 3 weeks compared to tender which takes an average of 20 weeks in order to issue the letter of award to the respective supplier.

The bidding result is straightforward and is based on the lowest • bid price offered. This results in faster and less complex decision making. Commonly, suppliers enjoy faster bidding results.

Government agencies avoid tedious process of examining • different suppliers with different specifications.

• It fosters broader business participation as all qualified suppliers will, be competing with each other on a level playing field.

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD E-PROCUREMENT IN ORISSA to works related to tendering activities, which covers almost 85% of Orissa Government’s procurement budget.

S K Panda, SIO & Senior Technical Director and Nihar Ranjan Biswal, Scientist, from National Informatics Centre, Orissa

With the objective of bringing reforms related to public procurement under the administrative reforms, Government of Orissa with World Bank, formulated an agenda out of which e-Procurement was a priority area. Accordingly, NIC was entrusted by Govt. of Orissa to undertake the automation of procurement practice. With the principle that what is good for citizen is good for the government, Government of Orissa and NIC committed to adopt e-Procurement as a major e-Governance initiative during late 2006 to bring transparency and accountability in public procurement process. With introduction of GePNIC (Government e-Procurement Application of National Informatics Centre) by NIC during 2007, achieving the goal became a reality. GePNIC, being a Mission Mode e-Governance Project, caters

18

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

ACHIEVEMENTS Department officers have been enabled to create and publish the • tender online along with corrigendum.

Department bid openers, open technical and financial bids online • in stages. The bids can only be opened after the designated time and only by the pre-selected bid openers.

The financial evaluation is done automatically and comparison • chart is generated indicating the L1 and other bidders. The award of the project is automatically intimated to the bidder by mail and through the portal and public can see the results of the tendering.

The application facilitates free online portal registration by any • bidder from any place and is a self-registration process.

The bidder also has to register his Digital Signature Certificates to • get access the bidding process.

The bidder could search, prepare and upload his bid documents • that are stored in encrypted format thus not revealing the bidders price and identity.

Implementor: National Informatics Centre, Orissa State Unit Website: www.orissagov.nic.in

WINNERS - mGOVERNANCE JURY AWARD AND PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD RAILWAY SMS SMS 139 Service, offered by Spice Digital Ltd in collaboration with Indian Railways (IRCTC) and Bharat BPO, is used to provide railway information. SMS Service is used to provide railway information like PNR enquiry, train arrival / departure, time table, fare enquiry etc. on a single short code 139 which is accessible Pan India from All major telecom operators. Users can send their 10 Digit PNR number to 139 in the form of an SMS to get the required information online.

ACHIEVEMENTS • Railway Service on 139 is now available on SMS and voice (IVR and Agent) from anywhere in India.

• More than 1 million indian citizens use this service across India • Created a pool out of the defined resources and handled the activities on a priority basis.

Laxminarayan, Group General Manager, SCZ, IRCTC, Anil Chopra, Deputy General Manager, Rail Sampark and Pankaj Gupta, Business Head (Enterprise), Spice Digital Ltd

•

Only authorized officials can perform the critical tasks because of features like role based access, encryption and locking / unlocking at every stage of randomization.

Implementor: Indian Railways Website: www.indianrailway.gov.in

WINNERS: GRASSROOTS TELECENTRE JURY AWARD AND PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD VISION CENTRE Vision Centres are aimed at providing comprehensive primary eye care services to the rural and remote population and thus create access to quality eye care. Each Vision Centre covers a population of 50,000 to 60,000. These centres are equipped with ophthalmic equipment such as slit lamp, streak retinoscope, direct ophthalmoscope, trial sets, schiotz tonometer, basic sterilizers, BP apparatus, 90D lens, digital camera, and a computer with a webcam and high bandwidth (4 mbps) point to point wireless (802.11b - license free spectrum) or BSNL broadband connectivity. These centres are run by well trained ophthalmic assistants who perform slit lamp examination, refraction, treating minor ailments and a counselor to counsel the patients and manage the vision centre operations. All investigation results are directly entered into computer using electronic medical record software and medical images taken are attached to the medical records that are accessed by the ophthalmologist at the base hospital while providing consultation.

ACHIEVEMENTS Vision centres are providing eye care at the door steps of the • rural areas.

It has reached and served nearly 80% of those in need of eye • care within a period of two years which highlight the changes in the health seeking behavior.

The conventional camps could screen the cataract cases and • could not help other eye diseases like diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and others, but these centres are permanent and could provide comprehensive eye care to the community.

20

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

B.S.Ganesh Babu, Senior Manager-IT & Systems, Aravind Eye Care System

• •

Availability and supply of medicines and spectacles at the centre ensure the compliance rate of treatments advised.

Only 7 to 10% of the people gets referred to base hospital for further treatment otherwise nearly 90% of the people could gets treatment at these tele-centres.

Implementor: The Aravind Eye Care System Website: www.aravind.org

WINNERS - CIVIL SOCIETY JURY AWARD ICT SOLUTION FOR SOCIETY FOR ELIMINATION OF RURAL POVERTY (SERP) Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) has formulated and implemented successfully new schemes in the areas of insurance and pensions, dairy, health and nutrition, gender, disability, Non-Pesticide Management (NPM), jobs and education for empowerment of rural women in particular and rural poor in general. Besides, it is also responsible for implementing co- contributory insurance and pension scheme called “Abhaya Hastham” announced by the government of Andhra Pradesh. SERP assigned the responsibility of developing and implementing IT solution to TCS for implementating an ICT solution to automate all the functionalities of SERP and capture all transactions of SHGs and their federations. The major objectives for implementing this project is to capture all Self Help Group (SHG) transactions at their origin, solution to make program monitoring easy for the government, performance monitoring of different SHGs and fast and ready flow of correct and right data to all the stakeholders ACHIEVEMENTS • ICT solution to SERP covered all the functional areas related to SHG and bank linkage program.

• The functional areas covered in the ICT solution are for monitoring

Representatives from SERP

• • • •

the whole SHG movement and successful implementation of microcredit scheme in Andhra Pradesh.

SHG and VO wise loans – target, achievement and repayment.

Government can compare performance SHGs, Village Organisation & Women Group and MSs by setting parameters.

Banks and financial institutions can check the performance of SHG online and disburse the loans.

All the transactions like savings, loans received, loans repaid, and so on are made transparent and visible to outside world.

Implementor: Tata Consultancy Services Website: www.rd.ap.gov.in

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD COMMON SERVICES CENTER PROJECT

Mukesh Hajela, CEO & Vice Chairman, NICT-INDORE

The Common Services Center is a project initiated by Government of India for providing better citizen services in rural areas under NeGP initiatives. It is basically a uniform and unified large scale project of various such e-Governance Project like Gyandoot, Rajasthan School IT Project, Lok Mitra and many more. The key at this time in implementation is not the number of CSC but the focus of NICT is to provide such a business model which will become continual and sustainable process rather then a piloting model Its business model includes various B2C and G2C services. Its emphasis is to bench mark those services immediately, which are of daily need to immediately start cash flow at these kiosks in order to make them sustainable. It has started business facilitator services, apart from this electricity online bill collection service is one of thier best USP

ACHIEVEMENTS Sustainable functioning of CSC kiosk because in past also there • were efforts to open such kiosk but due to lack of G2C and other B2C services they could not succeed.

Utilizing the digital opportunity through CSC project launched •

by Government of India for rural development and poverty eradication.

Implemented automated Gram Panchayat Software individually • at each Gram Panchayat and started providing Birth Certificate, Death Certificate, basic MIS of Gram Panchayat, documentation of Gram Panchayat and providing MIS in soft copy to Tehsil and Collectorate.

• They have roped in Electricity Bill Payment and Insurance, Banking services in CSC’s.

Implementor: NICT (Network for Information and Computer Technology),Indore Website: www.nict.co.in

October 2009

21

WINNERS - MUNICIPAL IT JURY AWARD AHMEDABAD MUNICIPAL CORPORATION To eliminate corrupt practices, the e-governance system was built to to provide better services to citizens. Success of e-Governance depended on use of Information & Communication Technology (ICT) in mobilization of Government resources and utilization of these resources. e-Governance enabled the City Government to re-engineer the processes in delivering speedy and better civic services. It eliminated discretionary powers vested with employees and removed human interface in decision making process to ensure transparency. It also eliminated lengthy and cumbersome procedures involved in storage and retrieval of information. The integration of all the departments have made free flow of information across and has in built audit trial. It has brought corporate culture to city government employees.

Implementor: Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation Website: http://www.egovamc.com/

Capt Dilip Mahajan, Deputy Commissioner and Dr Kamlesh Patel, Leader, from Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, along with Dr. Neeta Shah, Director, Gujarat Informatics Ltd.

ACHIEVEMENTS Revenue collection jumped from 38% to 85% in 5 years time.

• All departments were integrated.

• As Municipal Corporation were more responsive and transparent, • chances for corruption were eliminated.

Quicker services were provided to the citizens.

• 24-hour remote access to AMC transactions and services.

• • Payment gateways and electronic transactions eliminated manual intervention.

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD MONOFEYA PORTAL

Dr Ahmed Mouhmed Tobal, General Manager, Education Project, Ministry of State for Administrative Development, Egypt, receiving the award on behalf of Monofeya Portal

Monofeya has become the first governorate in Egypt to have applied the electronic system in performing services for citizens and present an online service considered as a direct contact between the citizens and the governorate leaders to enable the citizens send their complaints, opinions and suggestions through the portal. From the aspects of development and utilizing the telecommunication and information technology, unemployment is eliminated and various job opportunities are created for the youth. The portal also enabled the youth to obtain a registered flat from the government through Mubarak National Project of youth housing through the advertisements on the portal established by the governorate.

24

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

ACHIEVEMENTS The departments of the governorate interacted via the internal • communication network to save time and speed performance.

Reporting through the portal databases to provided access to • all people, what has a positive effect on decision making in the right time.

Availed interactive service for people through the internet.

• Electronic services were presented by municipalities, directorates • for the native citizen without getting to the service place.

Use of information and communication technology to disseminate • the results of the local certificates, saved transportation time and money.

Implementor: Monofeya Governate Website: www.monofeya.gov.eg

INTEGRATED EMR Helps you eliminate paper charts Faster document processing Easy storage and retrieval of data Instant access to patient records Support for Charts and Schematics

EASY TO USE User friendly interface Simple mouse-click access Quick learning curve

CUSTOMIZABLE Designed for individual requirements Integration with existing applications Workflow based technology Selective modules

SECURE Access control passwords Encrypted data for confidentiality HIPAA compliant Audit on all transactions HL7 transactions

ADVANCED FEATURES Publish Charts/EMR Follow-ups Referral Management Voice Recognition Workflow Management Correspondence Manager SMS and Email Alerts Centralized/Distributed Implementation

WINNERS - e-AGRICUTURE JURY AWARD KISSAN KERALA PROJECT KISSAN Kerala – is an integrated, multi-modal delivery of agricultural information system, which provides several dynamic and useful information and advisory services for the farming community across Kerala. It is one of the citizen centric e-governance projects of the Department of Agriculture, Government of Kerala. The project was conceived, developed and managed by the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management- Kerala for the Department of Agriculture, Government of Kerala. Objective of this project is to provide “right information to the right person(s) at the right time in the right place(s) and in the right context” dynamically using a combination of advanced technology portal, television based mass media programs, telephone based call centre, mobile SMS based advisory and broadcast service.

ACHIEVEMENTS The core deliverables and achievements of the project is an • integrated multi-component, multi-modal delivery of Agriculture Information Services system that is accessible anywhere anytime by all concerned.

• A weekly agriculture television program - in local language that provides selective information dissemination of best practices, success stories, departmental news, news on various schemes,

R Ajith Kumar, Chief Coordinator and K R Srivathsan, Former Director, Kissan Kerala (IITM-K) along with Rathan Kelkar, Director IT, Kerala IT Mission, Government of Kerala

•

market analysis, cultivation methods, analysis of current issues, etc. Care has been taken to ensure that KISSAN Krishideepam is authentic and totally produced in-house by agricultural and media experts.

The project has launched the country’s first online video channel in Agriculture. More than 100 selected videos (telecast quality) were made available through the channel.

Implementor: Department of Agriculture, Govt. of Kerala Website: www.kissankerala.net

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD E-VELANMAI Nadu. Its objective was to test and evolve an ICT enabled agricultural technology transfer model named as ‘e-Velanmai’ for addressing the problems faced by the farmers in selected command areas of Tamil Nadu.

P. Balaji, Assistant Professor (Agricultural Management) & Co-Principal Investigator of e-Velanmai Scheme, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Chennai

Less than 20 per cent of the technologies generated by Agricultural Universities were transferred to the farmers field in India due to the lack of an appropriate technology transfer model. Hence an action research was experimented to test verify and validate the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based agricultural extension model called ‘e-Velanmai’ (electronic Agriculture) for addressing the agricultural problems of farmers through ICT tool based dissemination of agricultural technologies from the Scientists of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) directly to the needed farmers. This action research was started during July 2007 with the support of the TN-IAMWARM project of the Government of Tamil

26

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

ACHIEVEMENTS The farmers (members) or their children are trained to frame the • photograph of symptoms in a digital camera and to upload them for advice from the scientists of TNAU and receive the technical advice through internet or mobile.

So far, 405 farmers joined the scheme by paying membership • fee. At least one individual from each farmer’s family was trained to handle ICT tools successfully.

1120 expert advices were offered to the farmers in all the three • sub basins to solve both problems and decision based queries.

Twelve visits were made by the scientists to the farmers’ field to solve complex problems.

The volunteer inspects the farmer’s field and frames digital • images using a camera and transfers the photo through www.fileflyer.com using the lap top and internet surfing device.

Implementor: Centre for Agricultural and Rural Developments Studies, Agricultural University Tamilnadu Website: www.e-velanmai.com

WINNERS - CIVIL SOCIETY/DEVELOPMENT AGENCY OF THE YEAR JURY AWARD TELECENTRE PARTNERSHIP FOR DEVELOPMENT Gedaref Digital City Organization (GDCO) is an NGO based at Gedaref in Sudan. GDCO is the founder of the first national telecentre academy in Africa, called the Sudan National Telecentre Academy or SuNTA, which is the 13th such academy in the world.

This project gives the farmers the opportunity to be medically treated using information technology (telemedicine) to reduce the cost and provide the patients with high quality of treatments against serious diseases .

ACHIEVEMENTS The project ensures environmental sustainability by preventing • over exploitations of the resources.

This e-Farmer project is a great partnership where partners • (farmers, NGOs, PPP) from different parts of the world share experiences, best practices and knowledge to make the life more comfortable for farmers communities.

More than 13.000 farmer's information are installed in the system • of Gedaref mechanized agriculture corporation (GMAC).

Farmers renewed their farm license annually and it was done • manually in two to three days, but now they can renew in few minutes.

Zaki Aldeen, Master’s Student, Sudan receiving the award on behalf of Ahmed Eisa, Chairman, GDCO

• •

Farmers and traders can easily sell and buy crops.

Reduction in the cost of. agricultural planning and Geographic coordinates (demarcation) because it is conducted by the trained engineers in GMAC.

Implementor: Gedaref Digital City Organization Website: http://gedaref.com

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD PROJECT E3

Niranjan Meegammana, Managing Director, e-Fusion, Sri Lanka

Project E3, a Public-Private-Community Partnership, innovated an adaptable, scalable and replicable solution for sustaining Telecenter Networks (TCN). E3 stands for e learning, e business and e leadership, designed to serve emerging digital knowledge needs of rural societies, develop micro economic networks and to address MDGs through telecenter leadership. Aimed at scaling up to 587 Telecenters in Sri Lanka, In the first year, Project E3 helped in improving sustainability of 60 Telecenter network in Uva province of Sri Lanka by improving e services, visibility and usability. The impact of E3 shows that Uva TCN sustainability growth by 96% in an year reducing closing risks from 68.3% to 18.33%.

ACHIEVEMENTS The average number of users has grown from 28 to 101 (364%) • and average income grew from Rs. 7650.00 to Rs. 17597.00 (230%) with in a year. This is viewed as significant increase of performance in the network.

E3 developed skilled telecenter operators to sustain • telecenters implemented e learning to improve 150 rural youth communities.

Developed telecenter leadership forming telecenter community • helped securing more than $ 80000 funding for projects for the network created a knowledge network among 150 telecenters Initiated global collaboration for Telecenter Research in Sri Lanka Uniting Telecenter operators for professional development.

• Established a common portal for sharing knowledge and discussion led to empowerment of grassroot telecenter workers.

Implementor: Niranjan Meegammana Website: www.telecenter.lk

October 2009

27

WINNERS - ICT ENABLED SCHOOL OF THE YEAR JURY AWARD ‘FOR GREEN SCENE, STAY GREEN’ PROJECT ENABLED THROUGH ICT The school has taken up a project titled ‘For green scene, stay green’ and the following activities were identified for the same: (i) Waste Management (ii) Energy Conservation (iii) Recycling (iv) Eliminating Plastic & (v) Increasing green cover. The school project has extensively used ICTs for promoting environment friendly practices and promoting awareness among students. Through the use of e-mails, chat, videoconferencing, media, websites and telephones, the school has become an active learning partner with other schools. Students of the school have taken up the role of ‘Little Ambassadors’ to bring about a change in the school, neighborhood, and the community at large, through integration of technology for generating awareness.

The school is the proud owner of two state of the art computer laboratories. Both are equipped with LCD projectors and fully functional systems with net facility. The school also has a bank of over 130 lesson modules in various subjects prepared by the teachers of the school.

ACHIEVEMENTS • The project has helped inculcate environment friendly practices among students.

• Students of the school are now more aware of the pressing Implementor: BVB Public School, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh Website: www.bvbpsjh.com

Chamala RamaDevi, (Senior Principal), A.G.Lakshmi Sujatha, (Science Teacher,) Arunasree Ganti, Mathematics teacher, Anuradha Chaganti (Mathematics teacher), Suvarni Rao (Academic Co-Ordinator)

•

•

•

problems effecting the climate and taking appropriate measures to spread knowledge through ICTs. Technology awareness has also increased among students and IT has been successfully used by the school in socially relevant projects.

The school has partnership with Charles Edward Brooke Girls’ School, London. The partnership aims to provide an international dimension to the participating schools.

Global school partnership gives students fantastic opportunity to share their lives and learn from one another by working on joint projects with global themes including environmental concerns.

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD INNOVATIVE ICT MODEL IN EDUCATION

R K Kapoor, Dean of ICT, Scindia School

The Scindia School has used a unique and innovative model to derive best results using ICT tools. Teachers use well researched web links/ digital content structures as per syllabus plan. The Math Lab is used to provide an understanding of difficult concepts in mathematics. Online testing tools are used to evaluate understanding of a student. Game based learning is used for fun Teaming and Collaborative activities.

Unique mix of multimedia and threshold technologies ensures creation of 24x7 learning environment. Cost effective labs have been created using Ncomputing Solutions which helps accommodate students with varying learning styles and differences.

The school computer-centre has a large network of Dell servers & 300 Pentium-based machines that have helped in addressing the technology training needs of students.

28

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

ACHIEVEMENTS The Scindia School ranked on top in Computer Literacy • Excellence Award for Schools -2003 at State Level in a survey done at National Level.

The School has the credit having a “School On Campus • Agreement” with Microsoft.

Top-notch IT facilities allow students to surf the internet; research • information or check e-mail at their own scindia.edu e-mail address.

The concept of “Smart Campus Cards” and biometric based • finger print scanner has been introduced for the students and being used extensively for their day to day campus life.

All commonly used software as well as many special softwares • are installed to cater to students’ academic requirements.

A large number of educational multimedia CDs are also available • as part of the school’s effort to provide all-round academic support through IT.

Implementor: The Scindia School, Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh Website: www.scindia.edu

WINNERS - ICT ENABLED UNIVERSITY OF THE YEAR JURY AWARD GUJARAT COMMON ENTRANCE TEST, (GCET) 2009 GCET 2009 is the Entrance Test conducted by Gujarat Technological University (GTU) for admissions to Masters of Business Administration (MBA) and Masters of Computer Application (MCA) courses in all affiliated Institutions throughout Gujarat. This project serves the needs of the University in automating the examination delivery process and ensuring quicker turn around time for creating content, publishing question papers, evaluating candidate responses, and announcing results. This project also provides a fully technology based solution for student counseling through online allocation of college seats.

This was the first time in India that any State-level (Government) Entrance Exam was conducted online. The exams were conducted from 1st July 2009 to 5th July 2009, at 37 Online Test Centers across 21 Institutions in 11 cities across Gujarat. The entire project used cutting-edge technology and offered innovative solutions to address the requirements with regard to Online Application Processing, Online Exam Delivery and Online Counseling for all professional courses in the state.

ACHIEVEMENTS GCET has benefited the students by providing them: • An application system where students can apply online; • Easily downloadable “Admit Cards” for examination purposes; Implementor: Gujarat Technological University, Ahmedabad City, Gujarat Website: www.gtu.ac.in

Manish Bharadwaj, Director Census Operations, Gujarat( Project Champion), Prof Nilay Bhuptani, Registrar, Gujarat Technological University and Madan Padaki, CEO, MeritTrac Services, Bangalore

• •

On the spot submission of Score Cards containing test results; Online counseling for seat allocation which has proved to be very transparent & system driven.

Benefits for GTU: A system where daily reports of Application form status has been • made available; A system which ensures complete security of the question • papers; A system where candidates impersonation checks can be • carried out well.

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD EDUNXT INITIATIVE EduNxt is to enable distance education programs to have the same degree of acceptance as conventional programs both in the minds of prospective employers and other educational organisations.

Atul Negi, Head, Distance Education, Manipal Eduation, Sikkim Manipal University

EduNxt initiative was launched by Sikkim Manipal University’s Directorate of Distance Education (SMU – DDE) in 2009 with the objective of providing the students with a plethora of resources.

EduNxt functions on the principle of 3As + 4Cs. The 3 As of Affordability, Accessibility and Appropriateness are the guidelines for scaling up EduNxt across distributed learning. Meanwhile, the 4Cs of Content, Collaboration, Communication and Computing are the basis of developing EduNxt into a means of disseminating education among the not-so-privileged or the infrastructure – challenged.

SMU has armed its DE students with industry knowledge and skills necessary to be industry-ready. EduNxt focuses on personalised learning and mentoring at a very large scale. The long term goal of

30

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

ACHIEVEMENTS The EduNxt environment is being used today by over 55,000 • students and will be made available to over 130,000 students from August 2009.

The total cost of ownership of the EduNxt environment is very • low, and therefore, it has been used to help less privileged students achieve scholastic parity with others.

It has succeeded in bringing together students and faculty • members by enabling more interaction in the learning process.

The soft skills training along with the placement and internship • assistance through EduNxt has helped in the overall upliftment of the DE students through better employment opportunities.

The EduNxt platform is also being used to train, certify and • orient 6500 counselors to technology based education and its benefits.

Implementor: Sikkim Manipal University- Directorate of Distance Education, Manipal, Karnataka Website: www.smude.edu.in

WINNERS - GOVERNMENT/POLICY INITIATIVE OF THE YEAR JURY AWARD SAMS (STUDENT ACADEMIC MANAGEMENT SYSTEM) Student Academic Management System (SAMS) was introduced as an innovative initiation for providing an IT tool for simplifying the admission related concerns of the students, their guardians, the colleges and the authorities of the department. SAMS has two components i.e., e-Admission and e-Administration. e-Admission aims to use Information Technology to process common applications for admission into junior colleges for all students passing the 10th Board exam. The purpose of this initiative is to reduce time & improve efficiency for the college functionaries who have been doing this manually. SAMS aims to reduce cost and anxiety apart from making the process hassle free. Overall, the entire admission process is made transparent and citizen friendly. e-Administration manages the student information by accepting, adding, modifying or removing information about students and generating reports. Students, parents and faculty can share this vital information with each other.

S K Panda, SIO & Senior Technical Director, National Informatics Centre, Orissa, Nihar Ranjan Biswal, Scientist-C, National Informatics Centre, Orissa

• ACHIEVEMENTS • e- Admission of the SAMS project has increased the process efficiency of the admission process.

• Application form & prospectus has been made available online, Implementor: Government of Orissa, Department of Higher Education, Bhubaneswar, Orissa Website: www.orissagov.nic.in

•

• •

thereby reducing the travel cost of students.

The entire process has been able to reduce the time from about 75 days to 55 days and at the same time increased the transparency of the process.

Prefixed datelines & use of queries through website has increased information availability and has reduced the anxiety in part of applicants/guardians. e-Administration captures the student attendance, marks scored in tests, class timetable and previous education qualification.

It has also been used for purposes like Long Roll preparation, Matriculates Return, ID card & library card issue, etc.

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD IMPLEMENTATION OF SHARED COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY

The Andhra Pradesh Government had envisaged an ambitious plan to bring computer access into 5000 government schools to benefit 1.8 million underprivileged children. The purpose of the project was to enable under privileged school children with computer skills in order to bridge the digital divide. To equip each of these schools with a computer lab of 10 seats, the Government of Andhra Pradesh, after serious evaluation chose to implement the NComputing solution to utilise the PC capacity by sharing the resources/PC power of 2 complete PCs with 8 additional computing stations, without compromising on the their performance.

The uniqueness in the project has been its very fast implementation in a record time of 4 months. Government of Andhra Pradesh conducted an extensive evaluation and testing before its actual application. This decision resulted in not only a quick and problem free deployment but also saving a great deal of money.

ACHIEVEMENTS 5000 Government schools in Andhra Pradesh today are • equipped with an up-to-date computer lab with the latest computer hardware, Microsoft and e-learning softwares, trained instructors, and reliable electricity support.

The overall cost of the project was over 300 crores for 5 years; • with about 20% savings due to installation and deployment of the NComputing solution, allowing more schools to be equipped with PCs in the initial phase of the project.

• Over 1.8 million students now have access to computer labs and regular computer classes.

• The computing labs are being used to teach computer skills, office productivity (such as spreadsheets and word processing), as well as subjects like reading and math.

Implementor: Government of Andhra Pradesh Website: www.aponline.gov.in

October 2009

31

WINNERS - CIVIL SOCIETY/DEVELOPMENT AGENCY OF THE YEAR JURY AWARD HOME ICT NETWORK PROJECT This project has aimed at preparing and helping the rural youth for Information Technology courses in the local language of Sri Lanka (Sinhala) and English with the help of social network, e-learning, self learning, and distance learning. Under this project, in the year 2005 / 2006 , preliminary computer literacy was provided to 4000 students of the school. Special feature of this project is that the membership fee charged from each student has been used in purchasing computers to be used by them. The project helped the marginalised and deprived students in procuring computer literacy. Through the network of 500 Telecenters, a minimum of 5 lakh school children and youth have been trained in ICT using Sinhala and Tamil languages. In addition, they have been able to study web designing to hone their vocational skills and improve their knowledge of the English language. There are three social networks that the members use to avail facilities of English learning, self learning and distance learning. The project provides the village youth with opportunities to learn web designing as a part of vocational training.

ACHIEVEMENTS • The project has given an opportunity to the students of small scale computer training center to get an understanding of the IT Implementor: ICT Mini Campus Virtual Society, Sri Lanka Website: Not Found

Niranjan Meegammana, Managing Director, e-Fusion, Sri Lanka, receiving the award on behalf of Home ICT Network Project

•

•

•

sector from an international perspective.

The project also promises to provide opportunity of training various capsule courses like MS Office, Graphic Designing, Web Designing, etc.

This project is implemented to enhance the digital learning rate of rural students and youth. They get training in the Nenasala in their own village similar to the training received in a town or a foreign country.

The project has helped create a network of IT and web designing knowledge for the students thereby creating employment opportunities for them.

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD HOLE IN THE WALL EDUCATION

equivalent to the skills of most modern office workers. Along with the stimulating educational games, curriculum related content is provided to help children with their schoolwork.

Suhotra Banerjee, Relationship Manager, Hole-in the Wall Education

HiWEL, a joint venture between NIIT Ltd. (IT Training & Development Company) and the International Finance Corporation (a part of the World Bank Group), was initiated as an experiment in 1999 to facilitate learning for the marginalised children, through unconditional and public access to computers; to improve the quality of teaching; motivate children to complete school; and to ensure that skills of youth meet the needs of India’s emerging economy. The computers, typically located in a government school playground or in the community are unsupervised and are available to the children for at least eight hours a day. Working in self-organised groups and helping each other, the children typically navigate within minutes and begin to browse in about an hour. Within three months they achieve basic computer literacy, and by nine months they have achieved the proficiency level

32

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

ACHIEVEMENTS There has been an increase in learning interest and higher • enrollments in the children, allowing them to concentrate on higher level tasks like mentoring students and leading class discussions.

About 300,000 out-of-school and in-school children, in India, • Africa and Cambodia, have been directly impacted by HiWEL. HiWEL Learning Stations have also been able to boost the • confidence levels of certain children with special needs (CWSN) with the usage of interactive educational content in the juvenile homes.

The project is the first attempt at applying the principle of self• organising systems to primary education, which is representative of a new area in theoretical physics.

Implementor: Hole-In-The-Wall- Education Limited (HiWEL), New Delhi, India Website: www.hole-in-the-wall.com

WINNERS - BEST ICT ENABLED HOSPITAL OF THE YEAR JURY AWARD SIR GANGA RAM HOSPITAL, DELHI The hospital has installed an internationally acclaimed software, TrakCare, for implementation of HIS in its pharmacy. The system offers a tight integration between patient registrations, admissions, billing, discharges, ordering, prescription, pharmacy, laboratories, imaging, stock indenting, purchase, receiving, stores and finance modules.

The pharmacy management system includes ordering of medication from the wards, with patient allergy alerts and drug to drug interaction warnings, intelligent drug substitution in the pharmacy from existing stock, inventory controls and MIS reports. Patient billing is automated so that the bill is always updated and available at all times with virtually no errors in billing. Tight integration between various activities relating to stock (purchase requests, receiving, consumption, etc.) have resulted in a tighter inventory control as well as smaller inventory holding at the hospital.

Dr. Karanvir Singh, Consultant Surgeon, and Dr. Rajesh Garg, Network Engineer, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, New Delhi

ACHIEVEMENTS • Better patient management and inventory and cost control.

• Instant availability of patient data to doctors via EMR module ensures continuity of medical care.

• Integration of laboratory machines with HIS. • Single continuous electronic patient medical record.

Implementor: Dr. Karanvir Singh, Head-Medical Informatics, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital Website: http://www.sgrh.com/

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD HOSPITALS UNDER MUNICIPAL CORPORATION OF DELHI

folder with details of each patient visit has been made available at all of the 6 hospitals. This has enabled the doctors to have ready access to past episodes and information of the patient thus ensuring efficient patient care.

Dr. Venugopal, Medical Superintendent, SDN Hospital of Municipal Corporation of Delhi

Municipal Corporation of Delhi, has six major hospitals to provide tertiary patient care for the public. The HIS implemented at all hospitals helps in patient registration with demographic details, out patient visits, doctors appointment scheduling, admissions/bed transfers/discharges, order entry, laboratory/radiology/cardiology result reporting, operation theatre management, main stores, sub stores and pharmacy etc. Automation has also helped in generating timely census reports with accurate data. Various other reports, which are required for the government, can be generated easily, as the data is available electronically. Stock reports are now generated online and audits are done based on the system generated reports. Patient

34

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

ACHIEVEMENTS Successful implementation of hospital information system at 6 • MCD hospitals.

HIS caters to needs of out patient as well as inpatient • functionality.

Better patient care by retrieval of records, reporting system, • control on inventory, availability of patient record online and generation of statistical reports online.

HIS has also made medical records management much easier.

•

Implementor: Dr. RC Patnaik, Chief Medical Officer (Health Informatics), MCD Website: http://www.mcdonline.gov.in/healthdetail. php?id=1

WINNERS - BEST GOVERNMENT/POLICY INITIATIVE OF THE YEAR JURY AWARD TAMIL NADU HEALTH SYSTEMS PROJECT The Tamil Nadu Health Systems Project (TNHSP) was set up to implement the World Bank aided project including the HMIS project under the TN Health Department. Thirty hospitals have currently started operating live with the online system, in a short period of 6 months.

All respective end users are expected to use the system with NO data entry support. All registrations, stores, pharmacies, wards, laboratories and doctors’ out-patient (OP) processes are fully online and no manual records are maintained. The doctors are directly entering diagnosis, ordering lab tests and giving prescriptions online for all out patients.

The HMIS reporting system covering clinical, program, administrative including finance, personnel, infrastructure modules provides for immediate online access to the health administrators at state level on various critical data sets. The HMIS project brought in the services of various agencies to provide a state-of-the-art solution.

ACHIEVEMENTS • HMIS application is envisaged as a single state health IT system.

• Currently, in 30 hospitals; over 300 doctors currently enter around

Dr. S Vijayakumar, Spl Sectretary, Department of Health & Family Welfare, Government of Tamil Nadu and Project Director, Tamil Nadu Health Systems Project along with Dr. PK Amarnath Babu, State Co-ordinator, HMIS Project

•

6,000 patient records per day, while before implementation, the hospital records were completely manual.

The online system records show over 10,000 patient registrations, around 2000 lab investigations, and 8000 prescriptions being entered daily.

Implementor: Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Tamil Nadu Website: http://www.tnhsp.org/

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD AAROGYASRI HEALTH TRUST

for efficiency, transparency and accountability. An IT company is engaged to construct and maintain software, hardware and all data and medical records pertaining to the scheme.

Babu Ahmed, CEO, Aarogyasri Healthcare Trust

Under the Aarograsri Health Trust, initiated by the Government of Andhra Pradesh all BPL ration card holders (white card) are eligible for benefit. A pre-identified list of diseases have been covered under the scheme for providing treatment. Cashless arrangement with network hospitals is one of the key elements of the scheme whereby beneficiary once registered in network hospital does not have to pay at all for the entire process of treatment. The scheme provides coverage for meeting expenses of hospitalization and surgical procedures of beneficiary members up to Rs.1.50 lakhs per family per year subject to limits, in any of the network hospitals. Choice of hospital for treatment from among empanelled hospitals is also given to patient. The scheme is implemented online through an IT portal

ACHIEVEMENTS Since its inception 350 hospitals from the government and • private sector have joined the network and organized 11,375 health camps in rural areas 19,45,619 patients have been screened and 3,33,005 surgeries/ • treatments conducted at a cost of Rs.1063.46 crores 4, 60,107 patients are given medical consultation as outpatients, • free of cost.

Implementor: Babu A,CEO, Aarogyasri Health Care Trust, HM & FW Department Website: http://www.aarogyasri.org/ASRI/index.jsp

October 2009

35

WINNERS - BEST CIVIL SOCIETY/DEVELOPMENT AGENCY OF THE YEAR JURY AWARD AAROGYASRI HEALTH TRUST Aarogyasri Health Trust is a successful initiative of the Government of Andhra Pradesh in achieving good governance using ICT. The Government of Andhra Pradesh has covered more than 70 million people below poverty line through its Rajiv Aarogyasri Community Health Insurance scheme. The scheme beneficiaries do not have to pay anything to get treatment; it also covers all charges right from initial transportation to medication charges post-treatment. The model is a holistic approach to healthcare, ensuring that people are given free health check-ups by the network hospitals and 24-hour helpline, manned by 100 doctors and 1,600 paramedics that handle about 53,000 calls a day. Since the launch of the scheme on April 1st, 2007, 1,921,093 patients have been screened in 11,256 health camps organized at the village level in 23 districts.

Babu Ahmed, CEO, Aarogyasri Healthcare Trust

ACHIEVEMENTS Number of outpatients treated 541386 and inpatients treated • 450848 Number of patients screened till date are 2193249 • Number of surgeries performed till date 377795 • Number of medical camps organised 12738 •

Implementor: Babu A,CEO, Aarogyasri Health Care Trust, HM & FW Department Website: http://www.aarogyasri.org/ASRI/index.jsp

PUBLIC CHOICE AWARD HEALTH MANAGEMENT AND RESEARCH INSTITUTE

diagnose only the complex cases. Effective capacity of the system is thus enhanced by 5 times. In case of emergencies direct transfer to emergency response system (ambulance service) is also available.

ACHIEVEMENTS 104 Advice is currently the world’s largest health contact centre, • attending to an average 15,00,000 calls per month.

104 Advice has been able to identify certain epidemics in real • time and escalate them to the concerned authorities As of 13 May, 2009 – 104 Advice had registered 25,000 new • callers in a single day.

On 24 March, 2009 – 104 Advice received its 20 millionth call • since inception.

Balaji Utla, CEO, HMRI

104 Advice, the flagship initiative of HMRI, is a state-of-the-art health helpline that provides the 80 million people of Andhra Pradesh with round-the-clock, qualified and standardized medical information, advice and counselling in three languages—Telugu, Hindi and English.

With technology and committed domain experts, who are ready to push the envelope and challenge existing paradigms, 104 Advice is available to anyone in Andhra Pradesh with access to a telephone.

The scheme offers medical advice using triage (classifying the caller’s condition into ‘critical’, ‘serious’ or ‘stable’ states). It also offers counselling services. A decision support system is used to automate the diagnosis of the caller’s medical condition. Trained paramedics diagnose 80 percent of the calls using valid algorithms, while doctors

36

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

Implementor: Balaji Utla, CEO, HMRI Website: http://www.hmri.in/

EVENT REPORT

Enhancing Consumer Experience in Health Insurance 3rd Health Insurance Summit organised by Confederation of Indian Industry on August 31, 2009 in New Delhi

D

elivering the keynote address at the Summit, J Harinarayan, Chairman, IRDA, said Insurance companies need to work on database of hospitals and standardisation of hospitalisation processes and also towards integration of billing systems.

A large number of claims may be rejected due to genuine reasons but it still sends a very bad message to customers. There is need for having core coverages without too much of product complexity as it tends to confuse customers, said Mr. Harinarayan.

“Currently, health insurance is focused largely on hospitalisation whereas hospitalisation is only 1/3rd of overall healthcare costs. Insurers need to work on non-hospitalisation healthcare costs, while taking care of moral hazard issues,” added Mr Harinarayan.

Speaking on the occasion chief guest of the summit Mr. B.K. Chaturvedi, Member, Planning Commission said, “ Seventy per cent of expenditure on health is from the private pockets, with a majority from the rural areas. So, there is need to expand health care mechanisms to rural and semi-urban areas. We need to make investment in the two social sectors i.e. health and education, as being the focus of the Planning Commission’s 11th plan.”

Mr Chaturvedi called for a new approach to consumer awareness.

He assured that policy implications of recommendations made at the CII Summit would be considered by the Planning Commission. He also pointed out that the current products

Panellists in a session on Health Insurance organised by CII.

focus is on inpatient expenses, whereas the bulk of expenditure is outside the hospital. Thus products should cover this as well.

Mr. Malvinder Mohan Singh, Group Chairman, Fortis Healthcare and Religare Enterprise and Chairman CII National Task Force on Health Insurance said, “Healthcare has to make transition from curative to preventive care over the next few years and providers need to have minimum accreditation for ensuring minimum standards of care. Today this is largely missing. There is great need for investments in delivery network. Current network is not adequate and insurers need to see that there are right checks and balances for payments.”

Ms. Shobana Kamineni, Executive Director, Apollo Hospitals Group and whole time Director, Apollo DKV Health Insurance said, “there should be focus on enhancing consumer experience in health insurance.

This has to be kept in mind by the standalone health insurers, who are in a better position to do so.

Focus areas for product innovation would be core health products, health & wealth products, lifestyle products.

She called for an innovative approach to consumer education as adopted by bodies like the National Egg Coordination Committee and NDDB. The key to success would be to keep in mind consumer focus, be involved for the long term, ensure sustainability and consumer focus which delivering innovative products.

Mr. V Vaidyanathan, CEO & MD, ICICI Prudential, in his address mentioned that a range of initiatives like tax incentives etc. could be introduced to increase growth and penetration of health insurance.

Current health insurance model is heavily push oriented, that needs to be changed.

October 2009

37

TECH TRENDS

Information Technology Vital for Chronic Disease Management India has an extremely high prevalance of diabetes and the implementation of IT-enabled diabetes management programs may prove to be extremely advantageous in managing the impact of the disease.

Dr. Pankaj Raina Healthcare Industry Consultant VitalHealth Software

N

on-communicable diseases were estimated to account for 35 million (60%) of the 58 million deaths globally in 2005. Of these, 72% were estimated to have occurred in developing countries.

Looking at India’s health transition, chronic diseases contribute to an estimated 53% of deaths and 44% of disability-adjusted life-years lost.

Non-communicable diseases pose a different and more complex threat to the health systems of countries, already faced with the unfinished agenda of communicable diseases, and maternal and child health problems.

The hallmarks of these diseases namely long latency, chronicity, multi-organ involvement and need for long-term care make the management of chronic conditions difficult.

38

October 2009

Chronic diseases have multi dimensional impact on the community as well as on individual and it requires a lot of healthcare resources to manage them. Also at individual level one faces financial problems which sometimes are the reason of non compliance to the treatment plan.

In India cardiovascular diseases and diabetes are highly prevalent in urban areas and there is no definite data about rural population. Very few studies have focused on diabetes care and provided an insight into the current clinical profile of patients and their management. One study in Asia (DiabCare Asia), showed, the mean age of diagnosis among Indian respondents was 43.6 years. Fifty percent had poor control as measured by HbA1c, and 54% had late severe complications.

In another pan-India study with patients registered with providers, 70% of the patients were diagnosed by general physicians. Only 43.4% patients had their BP checked at the time of diagnosis. The figures were 17.6%, 5.6% and 4.2% for eye examination, kidney function tests and lipid tests. In spite of these low percentages, 27.4% and 26.5% of those surveyed had elevated blood pressure and diminished vision at the time of diagnosis. Only 7-11% of patients had been tested for HbA1c, lipids, blood circulation and kidney function after diagnosis, and 47.2% monitored their condition only four or less times in a year. This provides a base line data to researchers to understand

www.ehealthonline.org

the need for diabetes disease management solutions in India.

Many countries are trying to curtail its impact by designing Disease Management Programmes. These are based on evidence based protocols and assigns responsibilities for each care provider in the care team. It is concept which starts with the identification of a case and monitoring them to adhere to maintain the clinical indicators with in desired limits.

A growing body of literature suggests that diabetes-management programs in particular need an information technology (IT) backbone in order to be effective. In order for a diabetesmanagement program to be successful it is necessary to have a clinical information system to support it. The advantages of IT tools include: • Promoting better providerguideline compliance by presenting recommendations at the point of care • Helping to identify patients overdue for care and assisting providers to proactively reach out to them • Enabling patients to manage their own care through education and communication tools that allow them to receive direct feedback; and • Providing numerous other benefits like monitoring the patient indicators from individual to population level.

technologies offer the best potential for benefit. We believe that an integrated provider-patient platform, which adds patient-centered technologies to reminder system, adds benefits beyond expectation. This integrated platform achieves the envisioned benefits of diabetes management.

Conclusion

Providing POC reccomendations

Disease Management Model Disease management solutions need to be supported by clinical Decision Support, clinical information system and self management support. This model explains the solution design of the application. The care provided is integrated in such a way that the information flow is seamless between care provider team and the patients.

Components of Chronic Management Solution

Disease

Chronic disease management solution should support following features: Evidence Based Guidelines • Reporting and Feed back • Patient self Management • Alerts and reminders • Role based • Population management •

helps to improve diabetic-care processes, which in turn reduces the rate of diabetic complications, thereby generating clinical and economic benefit. For instance, promoting strict dietary compliance, which improves blood-sugar levels and lessens damage to small blood vessels throughout the body. This reduction in microvascular disease lowers rates of diabetes complications such as blindness, lower-extremity amputations, and endstage renal disease. Such outcomes not only improve patients’ quality of life but also reduce utilization of health

Diabetes management remains a challenge for developed and developing countries alike. The implementation of evidence-based guidelines and restructuring of clinical care organization has yielded gains in some countries. There have been several attempts in developing countries as well to generate feasible and effective care systems. These initiatives and projects hold promise but much depends on the re-orientation of the overall health system for effective and sustainable care.

While diabetes affects millions of Indians and places a tremendous clinical and financial burden on our society, diabetes management solutions offer an opportunity to improve care processes that enhance the lives of patients with diabetes and help control the medical costs associated with their disease.

IT-enabled diabetes management

Chronic Disease Managment Solution

Value Proposition by I.T IT-enabled

diabetes

management

care resources, potentially leading to cost savings.

Our analysis demonstrates that our Diabetes management solutions improve processes of care, prevent development of diabetic complications, and generate cost-of-care savings.

Technologies used by providers seem to be the most effective in improving the lives of patients with diabetes.

Based upon the current evidence, our analysis indicates that patient-centered

Indian healthcare being fragmented into public and private providers should make use of web based diabetes management application which is less costly and does not involve implementation hassles.

The earlier the physicians start using this tool more beneficial it is going to be for practice and patient.

Sooner or later this is the way which is going to be followed by provider community.

October 2009

39

PERSPECTIVE

Indian Healthcare and Information Technology According to Technopak Advisors’ report – ‘India Healthcare Trends 2008—This opens opportunities in insurance, healthcare and life sciences’, healthcare is a USD 35 billion industry in India, and is expected to reach over USD 75 billion by 2012 and USD 150 billion by 2017. This document lists how information technology can help manage the scale.

Anju Chawla Takkar, Group Project Manager, Infosys Technologies Ltd. shares her perspective on how information technology can help manage the scale.

I

ndian healthcare industry is expected to transform as the requirements of people are changing and patients are becoming more demanding. In addition the work and lifestyle changes of Indians and widespread adoption of technology like Internet, mobile communication, etc., has positioned Indian medical industry to get to the next level of operations and reach. While the industry is going to be global or at least there are plans around it, it makes sense that the practitioners as well as users prepare for the change to front lead the hype than just being followers.

This should not be restricted only to large cities/metropolitans or large hospitals and institutes; the upgrade is required at all levels and places to get the benefits.

Diagnostic services, medical devices/equipment, hospital chains, wellness products and services are some of the identified sectors for investments.

As the industry is pretty fragmented both for hospital and pharmaceutical sectors, there is potential for consolidation especially in semi-urban and rural areas. The concept of Social Entrepreneurship is emerging especially in southern India where startups are targeting healthcare for masses and needy 40

October 2009

population. This brings in a lot of incentives to venture capitalists because of provision for long term gains because of its scale.

The preparedness in terms of enabling the HCP with IT solutions will leverage opportunities in the field of medical tourism. The key selling points for medical tourism are its cost effectiveness and its combination with the attractions of tourism. Treatment cost is lowest in India—20 per cent of the average cost incurred in the US, Singapore, Thailand and South Africa.

INDIA – CURRENT HEALTHCARE SCENARIO Urban India (Small and large cities) Sun- Side Indian healthcare works on need based consulting. In most cases, doctors are available within 1 Km distance. Regular checkups and examination costs range between Rs. 100/- to 300/- per visit. Laboratory scans, lifesaving medicines are available at government aided hospitals as well as private diagnostic and pharmacy stores. The diagnosis and treatment equipments available are best in breed.

Flip Side Surgery and specialised treatment

www.ehealthonline.org

is extremely expensive and government-aided hospitals are over packed and are not able to provide required attention. People visit doctors when the condition becomes unmanageable. Only about 0.05% of the total population goes for regular preventive checkups.

Doctors / healthcare providers are operating in a free land and can very easily fleece a troubled patient. The system runs on trust and faith and not on a systematic process. Government regulations on healthcare are least enforced.

Legal system and practices are slow and ineffective.

Rural and Suburbs Sun Side NGOs and government-aided hospitals provide healthcare in terms of free medicines, eye operations etc. Many of them have a pool of extremely good specialists who work for a cause. India is still a country that believes in Karma, charity and self less help to poor and needy. A few charity hospitals use technology like VSAT for checkups in remote areas.

Flip Side There is lack of integrated information systems, which leads to unattended emergencies and poor

PERSPECTIVE IT as Transformation Engine: This section attempts to subdivide the issues and provide an opportunity of IT solutions that can be created / deployed to the advantage of various industry participants.

Description

Solution

Target Sector

Healthcare is chaotic HCP (doctors, hospitals) do not maintain patient and paper based records.

Patients are responsible for their historical data management.

HCP (doctors, hospitals) do not maintain patient records.

Patients are responsible for their historical data management.

Electronic medical records and patient health record management systems.

Target sectors -government aided hospitals and private hospitals.

Long queues and improper appointment between patient and doctor.

Prefixed appointments Intelligent systems, are rarely done and there for scheduling is no proper sequencing. and prioritizing appointments for doctors are required.

Synopsis

Description

Prefixed appointments are rarely done and there is no proper sequencing between different departments, if patient needs to visit more than one function.

As of now, some hospitals have only adopted IT for billing Web solutions like Google-Health vault can and registration. Some large hospitals and networks have also be a possibility. put together a PHRM but it is still scantily adopted.

As in large government aided hospitals, the number of patients as also messaging system (mobile enabled) to inform patients on their expected wait period.

As doctors are limited in government hospitals, a good scheduling system will ease out the pressure on resources as well as patients.

For private hospitals, where money is good, the same can encourage medical tourism as it will lead to better planning and transparency.

Healthcare is available There is no awareness / but is corrective and not priority amongst people even from middle class preventive. and above.

Web-based diagnosis tools, mobile based wellness coaching

Due to excessive population, the stress on resources is increasing and so most of the time is spent on putting meals and basic amenities together for the family.

follow-up care. Doctor:patient ratio is fairly dismal in rural areas. Rural poor depend on local untrained care givers leading to causalities as well as other complexities, which need to be referred to nearby city hospitals.

The above ecosystem, leads to problems that find their roots to unaccountability and non-scalability. The same can be attempted to be moved to “managed” mode using information technology. Some of the indirect benefits of using data management solutions like LMS, HIS and EHR etc are:

• • •

Epidemic Forecasting Telemedicine and Rural Reach Insurance Management

CLOSURE The above mentioned IT solutions need wider acceptance by HCPs as well as patients that have stakes in the larger market. The practitioners use technology in the space of surgeries/scans and diagnostics but information management is extremely poor. The key drivers for the change would be the IT savvy customers, Indian IT professionals and organisations and practitioners themselves. While the major Indian

What people need?

•

Home Service

•

Low cost regular checkups

•

Diet and wellness plans

•

Support during emergency situations

•

Large pharmacies

software industry players, who have been looking at US and Europe for business have seriously started pursuing India and NM (New Market), it is also imperative that we have our own branded products in this space just as they exist for other domains like accounting and banking. This requires serious innovation and branding in the market by Indian companies.

Further, it is important that IT education be mandated for all aspiring doctors and be made part of the 5 year curriculum so that adoption becomes smoother in the field.

October 2009

41

NEWS REVIEW

Perot Systems to provide IT services to Max Healthcare Max Healthcare and Perot Systems Corporation announced a 10-year agreement in which Perot Systems will provide IT outsourcing (ITO) and electronic health records (EHR) implementation for MHC. This agreement marks Perot Systems’ first full ITO in the Indian healthcare industry as well as the company’s first India-based healthcare client.

In this more than Rs. 90 crores contract, Perot Systems will provide Max Healthcare with full infrastructure management capabilities, data hosting, infrastructure support, project management support, help desk support and the implementation and clinical adoption of an electronic health records (EHR) system using VistA software, which is an open source software platform developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for healthcare facilities. The integrated Hospital Information System (HIS) and EHR will allow access to complete patient information across MHC. These advances are expected to enable MHC to improve the quality of care and patient healthcare delivery through better record accessibility, Computerised Physician Order Entry (CPOE) and care planning.

42

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

‘Max Healthcare is striving to revolutionise healthcare delivery in India.

In this effort, we were searching for a company with broad healthcare experience that could assume the responsibilities for our IT solutions and implement an EHR that would comply with evidence-based medicine and clinical best practice standards, ensuring quality of patient care. Perot Systems is that company,’ said Dr. Pervez Ahmed, CEO & MD, Max Healthcare.

NEWS REVIEW

Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences gets NABH Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, (AIMS) Kochi, has been accredited with NABH. With this, it has become the first university teaching hospital to get NABH certification and the only university teaching hospital to get NABL (labs), NABH (hospitals) and NAAC (education) accreditation certificates —a holistic healthcare accreditation package.

The certificate was handed over by none other than the Defence Minister AK Antony, who congratulated AIMS on this occasion and was impressed by the hospital infrastructure and the kind of social work it is doing in healthcare. Mr Antony said that Kerala should become a destination for higher education. He handed all the three certificates to the Vice-Chancellor of Amrita Vishwavidyapeetham, Venkat Rangan. By this, the university has become the youngest in the country to get NAAC accreditation.

‘It is these hospitals who are building hope and trust amongst the countrymen,’ said Giridhar Gyani, Chairman, Quality Council of India. However, he also lamented about the fact that the labs and nursing homes in the country are still very unregulated and practice low-standards.

Carestream Health India Reports 300th Shipment of High-PerformanceLaserImager Carestream Health India announced a milestone in India with the shipment of its 300th DryView 5800 dry technology Laser Imager to the prestigious Ruby Hall Clinic and Hospital, Pune. The DryView 5800 is a compact tabletop imager designed to provide output from PACS, CT, MRI, NIM, US, CR, DR, and other grayscale imaging applications.

A product of Carestream Health’s leadership in medical printing, the DryView 5800 provides both flexibility and reliability, delivering up to 75 radiographic films per hour with a time-to-first print of just 80 seconds. The printer offers 325 pixels-per-inch resolution and is an ideal companion to the compact KODAK Point-of-Care CR systems.

‘The compact design and convenience of the DryView 5800 make it an ideal solution for us. We are existing users of Carestream Health’s Imaging products and value the prompt and professional support that Carestream extends to us,’ said Dr. Avinash Nanivadekar, Head, Department of Imaging at Ruby Hall Clinic and Hospital, Pune.

October 2009

43

NEWS REVIEW

Dell buys Perot Systems for $3.9 b World’s second largest PC maker Dell Inc entered into an agreement to acquire computer services firm Perot Systems for approximately $3.9 billion, making it one of the biggest deals in the IT space since global financial turmoil hit the sector.

The terms of the agreement between the two-iconic brand were approved by the boards of directors of both companies, a statement from Dell said. Under the terms of the agreement, Dell would commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding Class A common stock of Perot Systems for $30 per share in cash. The deal would see an entity with $8 billion in services revenue. The expanded Dell would be able to provide a broader range of IT services and solutions and also supply its computer systems to Perot Systems customers.

Analysts feel Dell’s move on Perot is partly motivated by a desire to expand its foothold in computer services. And, it also reflects its ambitions in the market for healthcare information technology.’The Perot deal offers them plenty of opportunities in the healthcare and federal space,’ said Paul Roehrig, an analyst at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc. Perot, whose customers include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gets about half of sales from hospitals, physicians’ practices and health-insurance companies. President Barack Obama’s plan to expand health-care insurance

44

October 2009

www.ehealthonline.org

coverage to virtually all Americans, if passed by Congress, could boost Perot’s healthcare-related business.

The acquisition will create an entity with $8 billion in services revenue. Once the acquisition is complete, Perot Systems will become Dell’s services unit and will be led by Peter Altabef, the current chief executive officer of Perot Systems.

NEWS REVIEW

ResMed acquires CPAP and Ventilation distribution business of Respicure ResMed, a world leader in the design and manufacture of respiratory devices to treat sleep disorders, have announced the acquisition of CPAP and Ventilation distribution of longstanding partner Respicure.

ResMed currently operates in more than 70 countries worldwide and the acquisition is a major step forward for the Indian sleep and respiratory market. The move demonstrates ResMed’s commitment to growth and servicing of customers and patients. It positions the company to make further inroads into diagnosis, leading to improved health outcomes for millions of Indians.

The initiative is a timely move for ResMed as research linking the impact of sleep disorders and associated comorbidities continues to grow. A recent report released by the International Diabetes Foundation highlighting the association between Type2 diabetes and sleep disordered breathing is of particular relevance to India. The largest diabetes population in the world with an estimated 41 million people, or 6% of the adult population resides in India.

TAKE Solutions’ signs up Novel Therapeutics TAKE Solutions Ltd., leaders in Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Life Sciences products, has signed a deal with the full-service pharmaceutical company, Novel Therapeutics Pvt. Ltd. Chennai-based Novel Therapeutics is engaged in development, manufacturing and marketing of generic pharmaceutical formulations specifically dedicated for United States and other regulated markets. This will be TAKE Solutions’ first deal in Chennai for the deployment of the increasingly popular PharmaReady eCTD and SPL solution suite. This comes on the back of successful deals signed for PharmaReady installations and will be TAKE’s ninth client win in the country in the past nine months.

Talking about the deal, Mr. Ramesh L, Vice President - Sales, Life Sciences APAC, TAKE Solutions said, ‘We are thrilled with this partnership with a highly respectable global player in the drug products market. This also reiterates the fact that the Indian pharma industry has matured enough to realise the benefits of investing in cuttingedge technology solutions for long-term business gains. Being associated with Novel’s aim of providing their customers with niche technology-based drug products also encourages us to think that we are on the right path.’

October 2009

45

Asia's Premier ICT Event 2 - 4 December 2009 Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall, Colombo, Sri Lanka

Inviting Exhibitors, Sponsors and Partners to Participate in the Biggest event on ICT and Development in Asia

For sponsorship and exhibition enquiries, contact rajeshree@csdms.in

REGISTER NOW! Visit us at:

Organisers

knowledge for change

Host Organisation

ster www.e-asia.org/regi ion mail us at For further informat org registration@e-asia.

www.e-asia.org

’Healthcare Technology’ Directory

- November 2009 Issue

eHEALTH magazine is coming out with a ‘first-of-its-kind’ directory of ICT and Medical Technology vendors and suppliers for hospitals, healthcare providers and doctors.

The directory is aimed to create a comprehensive compilation of companies offering hardware, software, networking and communication solutions & medical electronics as well as specialised health IT solutions including EMR, EHR, HIS, HMIS, RIS, PACS and ERP.

For advertising opportunities in this issue, please contact: Arpan Dasgupta, arpan@ehealthonline.org, 9818644022; Bharat Kumar Jaiswal, bharat@ehealthonline.org, 9396423085