"Electronic Health Records in India "
Inderjith Davalur
Group CIO
Global Hospitals
Inderjith Davalur is currently the Group CIO of Global Hospitals Group, Hyderabad, India. He did his MBA and then MS in Healthcare Administration from the University of Massachusetts, USA and has worked for over 20 years in the US since 1986. He was conferred the Dean Shalloup’s Award for Academic Excellence in Health Professions for having scored the highest rank in the College of Health Professions His background has exclusively been in healthcare IT and has served on patient privacy and electronic health record committees in the US. He started his career in health care at the New England Medical Center in Boston where he created a custom database for tracking treatment modalities for the Department of Psychiatry. He then moved on to a private healthcare firm that managed Psych units at fourteen hospitals spread over four states in New England. He has created Treatment Outcomes database and worked as the MIS Director. He was also the CEO of Aosta Software Technologies.
There are several software packages currently available in the Indian market that offers EMR along with HIS (Hospital Information System), but unfortunately, there are only few takers for the EMR. Unless there is a serious effort at educating the medical community in India about benefits of an electronic system, we will miss out on this marvelous revolution.
Selling HIS or EMR packages to hospitals should not be the goal but a by-product. Software companies should first invest time and effort to educate the customer. Then they need to sell the appropriate package if it is the right fit. They should rather not make a sale if it is not the right fit for the customer and keep his respect for the company, and themselves than do otherwise.
I personally consider that a large portion of the responsibility in advancing this electronic revolution in India rests upon the software community. Journalism in the IT sector and especially healthcare has come a long way in providing an excellent platform for those with experience to share their views and knowledge. Software companies can do a lot for the community they serve and for themselves by paying more attention to the needs of the medical community and gearing up to meet them.
They can also share their knowledge with the medical community about all the marvelous things that are possible through software solutions. After all, if we can provide some of the top talent in software technology to the world should we not learn to benefit from that for our own advancement as well?
