30 Minute Interview

'Globally, Healthcare Institutions are Slow to Embrace Technology'

Cisco Systems, a pioneer in IT, commenced its operations in India in 1995. It introduced healthcare IT solutions around late nineties when the first wave of mobile collaboration and wireless product suites started in the US. Currently, Cisco commands over 63 per cent of mobility solutions market globally. Kapil Khandelwal, Director- Healthcare & Life Sciences, APAC, CISCO speaks to Sonal Vij about company's involvement in Indian healthcare domain, products offered and future plans. Excerpts:

Kapil Khandelwal Director- Healthcare & Life Sciences, APAC, CISC0

What is the expected return on investments that a healthcare provider can expect by adopting Cisco solutions?

Cisco is transforming the hospital operations through its 'human network' by using information to drive patient-centric, safe, and efficient care starting with changing the way care is delivered. Through our smart connected hospitals solutions framework, Cisco enables collaboration across the care continuum for safe, affordable and accessible healthcare. This transformation will empower patients to control, manage and influence their own healthcare and lead to a better patient experience. Cisco solutions can reduce the capex by 8-10 per cent and increase the operational efficiency by over 10 per cent per annum over the lifetime of a hospital, thus accelerating the breakeven for the investment in newer hospitals as well as enlarging the pie of the healthcare access in India.

How do Cisco solutions help in the day- to day operations of hospitals?

Cisco creates virtualisation of healthcare services, increase collaboration and converges voice, video and clinical and operational data through several solutions that are offered over the life cycle of the hospital from conceptualisation to post-construction and operations of the hospital buildings. These are summarised below:

Collaboration: Hospital information technologies need to unite patients, caregivers, administration, and families across the care continuum through the innovative use of data, voice and video so people can communicate wherever they are, using any device whether wired or wireless. Cisco has products and solutions that leverage on web 2.0 and unified communications to provide seamless collaboration across the care continuum.

Virtualisation: The reality in healthcare technology is that there is no standardised application across healthcare industry. In order to improve patient care through rapid access to information means that applications need to follow industry guidelines and workflows. Technologies that can increase access to information, anytime, anywhere and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO), lead us in the direction towards virtualisation of different layers of technology architecture. Cisco's Service Oriented Network Architecture (SONA), Medical-Grade Network, is an integrated service-oriented IT architecture that connects all components of that IT infrastructure, it provides virtualised infrastructure and application networking services to better support business applications and SOA environments, and offers proven lifecycle services and tools to accelerate and support customer application pilots and implementations within their Cisco networks.

Convergence: Traditional data, voice and video technologies in a hospital are quickly getting redundant and expensive to sustain. Newer technologies based on IP-platforms are making leading into a digital transformation and are cheaper to maintain. We are witnessing a convergence of data, voice and video over wire/ wireless IP-based networks in a hospital. These technologies are scalable and easier to operate and maintain in a hospital. Cisco's 'smart connected hospitals' provide this convergence into a single unified platform leveraging cutting-edge solutions.

IT adoption among healthcare institutions in India is still comparatively low as compared to developed economies. In this scenario, how do you strategise to market high-end solutions?

Traditionally, healthcare institutions, globally, are slow to embrace technology due to various factors like risk of lives, technology obsolescence, integration with other technologies, lack of standards and protocols for the solutions. Cisco's Healthcare and Life Sciences solutions address issues around making healthcare delivery safer, better, cheaper and faster. The two key drivers of healthcare operations that our solutions address provide clear value proposition to the healthcare institutions. These include increased revenues and reduced capital and operating costs. Hence, the financial viability of our solutions is clearly tied to the business models of the healthcare institutions and easy to justify and adopt.

IT is often key differentiator for the SMEs. What are your solution offerings that can be leveraged by such organisations to compete against the large healthcare providers?

Cisco's healthcare and life sciences solutions provide a scalable platform for SMEs that would like to scale their investments in technology as they grow their healthcare operations. Cisco's solutions at every level enable such scalability. One of the key differentiators SMEs can benefit from Cisco's solutions is the ability to define newer and alternative care delivery models such as health presence, location awareness, e-health/ mobile health which today the large healthcare providers, due to their current investments in technology, are unable to scale.

Could you please elaborate how does Cisco enable a wire-free hospital?

With the coming of 3G, Cisco has a whole suite of solutions under the mobility solutions for healthcare. These include:

Cisco Location-Aware Healthcare: This facilitates to quickly find equipment and enables people collaboration among mobile staff. Hospitals can quickly locate their mobile assets, from wheelchairs and gurneys to intravenous pumps and dialysis equipment, with Cisco Location-Aware Healthcare. Personnel can view a hospital floor plan on a computer screen to see the location of mobile equipment or personnel with attached WiFi tags, as well as all devices with built-in capabilities, such as laptops, tablet PCs, and Cisco Unified Wireless IP Phones.

In addition to finding people and things more quickly, it eliminates noisy, repeated overhead pages requesting equipment creates a more pleasant healing environment. Cisco's next-generation location-based services offering enables context-aware applications across a full range of RFID tags (active and passive), sensors and mobile clients - all with greater scale and accuracy.

Context-Aware Software: It features a wide range of location options, including real-time location, presence detection, chokepoint visibility and telemetry. Enhanced RSSI and TDOA support delivers greater scale accuracy and performance for a broad range of environments.

Cisco Secure Wireless: This enables healthcare organisations to confidently deploy mobile applications and services such as electronic health records decision support, e-prescribing and e-research. In addition, Cisco Secure Wireless provides the wireless foundation needed to deploy mobile care applications and location-aware services. Mobile caregivers can access information and order services from wherever they happen to be, using notebook computers, tablet PCs, wireless IP phones and new dual-mode phones, which can connect over either the hospital's WiFi network or cellular networks.

Mobile Care: Cisco Mobile Care helps facilitate collaboration among mobile caregivers, enabling them to access each other, no matter where they are, using Cisco Unified Wireless IP phones or new dual-mode (WiFi/ cellular) phones. A physician who cannot speak with a patient, for example, can simply press a button on the dual-mode phone to redirect the request to another physician. If nobody answers, the hospital can handle it according to policy- perhaps by trying again or by alerting another nearby physician.

Together with our partners, Cisco is enabling information access through wireless phones and other wireless devices for faster patient care from any location. Another application modernises nurse call systems by making them more effective and less intrusive. Traditional nurse call systems rely on overhead pagers, creating a noisy, unpleasant environment and interrupting nurses without indicating what the patient needs. Our unified wireless IP phones keep a history of alerts to help the nurse remember pending requests and system software keeps a record of interactions for the nursing manager. In some hospitals, patients can press a button on the bedside Cisco Unified IP Phone to indicate the nature of their request- for example, water or pain medication.

Cisco Mobile Intelligent Roaming: Delivers seamless mobile device roaming between cellular and Wi-Fi networks, based on real-time location information. This open system is designed to enable seamless handoff across a wide-range of partners IP-PBX solution vendors, mobile device manufacturers and overlay third parties.

Over 40 per cent of the worldwide workforce is mobile working with distributed, global teams. Work is no longer a place, but an activity that happens in multiple workspaces. For our customers, enabling seamless mobile collaboration as their workforce moves among different environments, devices and networks is imperative to maintain competitiveness and agility. Market discussion today, however, focuses narrowly on one mobile collaboration solution based on dual mode (cellular and Wi-Fi) handsets, ignoring the broad range of requirements for fixed mobile convergence that businesses have today.

sonal.vij@expressindia.com