PRESCRIPTION FOR BETTER CARE: Healthcare embraces AI in cloud – Technology News

Handwritten prescriptions, whiteboard duty charts at nursing stations and even upskilling courses for medical and non-medical staff in classroom settings could soon be a thing of the past at Apollo Hospitals. While its telemedicine initiative, Apollo Telehealth, is the posterboy of the digital transformation in healthcare, transforming the way patients and healthcare professionals interact, at the backend, Apollo Hospitals has taken a giant leap forward into the world of cloud with the goal of a paperless human resource (HR) department.

“Over the next five to ten years, we foresee a quantum leap in healthcare access, facilitated by the integration of technology in every aspect of healthcare,” said Sangita Reddy, joint managing director, Apollo.

With over 40,000 employees across its 71 hospitals, the Prathap Reddy-founded healthcare chain is fulfilling the talent management and learning and development needs of its staff using artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud. By implementing Oracle HCM (human capital management), a HR solution tailored for the healthcare industry, it has been able to identify the training needs of doctors and nurses across multiple formats and develop and host these modules on the Oracle Learning Cloud.

Proactively closing skill gaps, it helps adjust compensation for workers as they upskill, gain new credentials, and progress into the next level of their careers.

Apollo is not alone. Sri Ganga Ram Hospital in New Delhi is also witnessing the benefits of implementing Oracle Cloud ERP & HCM Applications, resulting in increased scalability, flexibility, business agility, and process optimisation and integration. The hospital’s business processes have been automated through strategic sourcing, planning of resources, and overall optimisation with the adoption of the Oracle ERP application. Additionally, management planning, integration, and automation of the HR processes have also made possible by the Oracle Cloud HCM to streamline their HR processes.

Making sense of tech

The moot point is this: Hospitals do not have closing hours – doctors, nurses and support staff work in shifts handing over the care of their patients to the next person on duty. At the backend, constant upskilling and retraining is essential to ensure they are able to deliver optimal patient care. Thus, hospitals have to plan for a variety of work schedules including static, rotating, split, or dynamic shifts. Better scheduling of staff according to the skills needed for positions and optimising schedules to reduce patient wait times is critical. These unique workforce challenges, from attracting talent with the right skills and managing complex scheduling structures to prioritising engagement and growth for employees constantly facing burnout, make it necessary for healthcare companies to incorporate intelligent automation and data-driven decisions into their daily operations.

Acknowledging these realities, healthcare operations management companies are now bringing in well-structured enterprise management systems with their cloud investments. “We’ve moved beyond the system of records and transactions to a more meaningful and end-to-end business performance management. The right window of opportunity was to aggregate into a single cloud solution, and we selected Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Applications for this,” said Kannan Sugantharaman, chief financial officer, Omega Healthcare Management Services, a healthcare outsourcing services firm.Similarly, one of India’s largest infertility specialty clinic chains, Indira IVF, has achieved significant business optimisation with cloud investments. With 108 centres across India, it was facing challenges due to numerous manual processes, making consolidation and scaling difficult. “With the constant support of Oracle, the large-scale implementation of modern age technologies and SOPs have helped us cut down the cost of the operations,” shared Kshitiz Murdia, CEO and co-founder of Indira IVF.

The big picture

India is the world’s fastest-growing market for digital health. The government aims at 100 crore Ayushman Bharat Health accounts in 2023. Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the heart of this transformation, potentially reimagining how healthcare is navigated, delivered, accessed, and managed across the subcontinent. Yet, patients often feel disconnected, unheard, and unsatisfied as healthcare providers are busy managing complex business processes, scheduling needs, empowering staff, improving retention, and predicting demand fluctuations. Herein, generative AI can become a game-changer in determining and simplifying business processes, taking away manual work, and supporting new delivery models.

Speaking on AI’s significant impact on the healthcare sector, Deepa Param Singhal, vice-president of Cloud Applications, Oracle India, said, “The healthcare landscape is in a phase of change – data and technology-driven change. The sector has increased emphasis on making healthcare more accessible, secure, reliable, and usable for better decision-making and patient care. To meet volatile customer demand, AI-based models are creating intelligence, improving governance, advancing customisations, and creating new experiences and workflows to drive care in healthcare.”

At the recently held Oracle Cloud World in Las Vegas, Oracle introduced generative AI services tailored specifically for healthcare organizations empowering patients with self-service functions. In addition, new workforce management capabilities within Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM were released to equip healthcare organisations to adapt to changing labour markets, meet volatile customer demands, and attract and retain workers.

KEY BENEFITS

Reduces time spent on administrative processes like documenting visits, requesting insurance
pre-authorisation for procedures, freeing up doctors and nurses to focus on their core work
Better scheduling of staff according to the skills needed for positions and optimising schedules to reduce patient wait times
Moves beyond the system of electronic records and transactions to more meaningful business performance management

Source link

credite