Hospikon 2010

'Don't Settle for the Second Best Due to an Urgency'

The theme this time was 'Sustainability@Healthcare- Managing the 3Ps'

Hospikon 2010, the second conference organised by Sancheti Institute For Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation Hospital Management Alumni Association (SIORHMAA), was held on 20th and 21st February at IMA Hall, Pune. SIORHMAA was started by Reny Varghese, Mohit Wankhade and Dr Deepak Sawant. The theme this time was 'Sustainability@Healthcare- Managing the 3Ps'. The conference, which was attended by over 200 delegates across India, was inaugurated by Vishal Bali, CEO, Fortis Hospitals Limited in the presence of mayor of Pune, Mohan Singh Rajpal. In his inaugural speech, Bali emphasised on how hospitals need to strike a balance between social responsibility and value-creation. Express Healthcare was the media partner for the event.

Bali was felicitated by Dr Parag Sancheti, Chairman, SIOR for his invaluable contribution to corporate healthcare. Rita Dutta, Associate Editor, Express Healthcare was felicitated for her healthcare writing by Reny Verghese, Organising Chairman, Hospikon, and Dr Dilip Sarda, President-IMA (Pune) was felicitated by Dr PV Bokil, Principal, SIOR College of Hospital Management for his achievement.

Prof BB Padhy

Arun Diaz

Manoj Dani

Vijay Gupta

The conference began with BB Padhy, Scientist - Defence Institute of Advanced Technology, speaking on 'Application of Fibre Optics in Healthcare'. "Fiber optics is helpful in imaging, sensing, surgery and diagnostic. Advantages of fiber optics include high degree of miniaturisation, considerable geometrical versatility, extreme handiness, possibility to access difficult locations in the body, biocompatibility, high degree of reliability, repeatable nature of the optical probes as regards the measurements and comfort and psychological advantages of the technology," said he. Fiber optics are useful in many areas of biomedicine. In 1964, the first invasive optical fiber oximeter was introduced. The fast and continuous rate of technological development has given rise to a large variety of measurement and recording techniques which can be applied to basic biomedical research and modern clinical practice. Optical fibers can be used in medical diagnostics (imaging and sensing and medical procedures (surgery/therapy).

The next session on 'Healthcare Projects and Beyond' was chaired by Arun Diaz, Director & Principal Consultant, Quest on the Frontier, Singapore. Sudhir Bahl, CEO, IVen Medicare India Ltd spoke on 'Challenges in Project Funding'. "If you have a brilliant idea and you have to the determination to execute it, then funding is not a problem," said Bahl, debunking the myth that funding in healthcare is a major challenge. Manoj Dani, COO, HPMC, Mumbai spoke on 'Franchising in Healthcare'. "Worldwide 17 per cent business is conducted on franchised basis and 3-5 per cent in Indian context. Industries such as food and beverages, apparel, education, beauty salons etc are proven models," he said. He further said that there is a huge growth potential in all segments of health and wellness industry. Franchising becomes feasible for pan India expansion at a rapid pace and brands can leverage their expertise and expand business at lower investment - from retail to big size hospitals, CRO, outsourced services.

Dr Deepali Junnarkar Roy, Joint Medical Superintendent, Inlaks Buddhrani Hospital, Pune, spoke on 'Good medicine is good business, But not vice-versa'. She said that optimum level of competition can be achieved by providing value to patients and not by just reducing costs. "Patients measure value by the service they get as an individual and also as a patient. Value measurement is multi-dimensional and a complex evaluation process. It is not just by two sides of a flip card: patient is alive or dead. It is mainly judged by clinical outcome. Many more factors are considered in value measurement and one of them is retaining their individual identity and giving personalised care," she said. She further added that the best financial performance measure of true economic profit is called Economic Value Added (EVA). "As the name indicates, economic profit is associated with the value creation at every level by every employee of the organisation. Mindset towards quality, culture of asking questions, and reward and recognition towards value creation are the building blocks of EVA," she added.

Post lunch, the session on 'Medico-legal Issues in Healthcare' was chaired by Vaijayanti Joshi, Principal, ILS Law College, Pune. Advocate Amit Karkhanis, Kay Legal Associates, Mumbai spoke on 'RTI & Confidentiality of Medical Records'. "The Delhi High Court ruled that medical records do not fall under the purview of RTI Act 'unless public interest is attached' holding in its landmark judgment that the Chief Justice of India came under the ambit of the transparency law," he said.

Dr PV Bokil, Principal, College of Hospital Management, Pune spoke on 'Medical Negligence & Arrest of Doctors — Recent Judgements'. "Negligence is defined as the breach of a duty caused by omission to do something which a reasonable man would do or doing something which a prudent man would not do by Law of Torts by Ratan Lal & Dhiraj Lal. A case of occupational negligence is different from professional negligence." He further elaborated on the jurisprudential concept of negligence according to which an element of mens rea must be shown to exist for negligence to amount to an offence. "For an act to amount to criminal negligence the degree of negligence should be gross. Negligence is the genus of which rashness is the species and the onus is on the complainant to prove negligence of a doctor," he said.

The next session on 'Healthcare Marketing' was chaired by Reny Varghese. Speaking on 'New Ways of Communication', Vijay Gupta, Dy Director, Hinduja Hospital, Mumbai, took the audience through importance and emergence of various social and professional networking tools like web 2, youtube, facebook, etc. "Twenty hours of video are uploaded every minute onto YouTube, 6,00,000 new members are added on Facebook per day and 900 number of blogs posts are put up every day and 27.3 million number of tweets happen on Twitter per day. He said that a blog can help a healthcare organisation as destination for information and community news, responsive to feedback, more staff can be involved with the website, including the public in the 'discussion' is easier and emergency notifications.

Vishal Bali

Dr Dev Taneja

Dr PV Bokil

Vivek Shukla, Healthcare Management Consultant gave a presentation on future opportunities and challenges in healthcare marketing. Talking about brand loyalty, he said, "Retained customer gives almost double the profit. Five per cent increase in retention can increase the operating profit by up to 20 per cent. When it comes to customer life-cycle, fully retained customer not only maximises revenue, but also get you more customers." He further said that options like online PR can benefit aspects like internal marketing, brand building, customer retention and international markets.

Day 2

The second day began with a session on 'Information Technology in Healthcare', which was chaired by Shanti Mathur, Head — Healthcare Solutions Delivery, IBM India. Commodore Suresh Sawhney, CMD, Dolphin Group of Companies spoke on 'Improving Patient Care with Reduced Cost Using RFID'. While elaborating on the key advantages of RFID, he said, "No contact or line-of-sight required to read data, simultaneous and multiple tag reads, 10s to 1000s in short time intervals, works in harsh environments (compared to bar code, optical scan technologies) withstands extreme temperatures, acid baths etc and can be read through the human body, clothing and non-metallic materials," he said. While speaking about RFID supply tracking solution, he said, "It is simple to setup and use, bulk inventory management, automated real-time equipment inventory is possible, it utilises RFID, so no manual data entry, etc.”

Dr Dev Taneja, Vice President, Planning and Strategy, Seven Hills Hospital, Mumbai spoke on 'ERP in Healthcare — A Manager's Perspective'. "To maximise profits, reduce costs and achieve a seamless healthcare continuum, it is imperative to improve the efficiency of back-end business functions across supply chain management, inventory management, patient relationship management, human resources, finance and billing. This can be achieved by business process optimisation and technology enablement through successful ERP implementation," he said. He further stated that lack of uniform reporting format, lack of standardised systems and processes, lack of uniform codes, disaggregated data which is collated at headquarters, no real-time availability of data for comparison, analysis and delay in decision making have necessitated generation of MIS. "A successful ERP implementation does not rely on further improvements of technology, but on bringing people and business up to the appropriate use of ERP technology to fit their defined business needs and objectives. People are the core of ERP implementation," he added.

Virupaksh Nagathan, Technical Consultant IBM India spoke on 'Interoperability Standards in Healthcare'. "Interoperability is the ability of one or more systems to exchange data/information and to be able to utilise the exchanged information. Interoperability in healthcare leads to patient safety and quality of care, communication among care providers, patients and access to vital medical information and productivity and workflow efficiency," he said. He further said that 'Integrated Healthcare Enterprise' brings providers and vendors together to achieve improved healthcare interoperability, provides reliable way of specifying a level of compliance to standards, promotes the coordinated use of established standards such as DICOM and HL7, publishes the guidelines in the form of technical frameworks and profiles and conducts connectathons a detailed implementation and testing process.

Rita Dutta being felicitated by Reny Verghese

The next session was on 'People Challenges in Healthcare'. Zahid Hussain, General Manager - HR, KIMS Hospital, Thiruvananthapuram, spoke on 'Dynamics of Human Capital in Healthcare'. "Your HR department's key performance indicators should reflect the organisation's health and help you take decisions to improve its profitability and stability. Some examples of data that you may monitor are HR CTC per employee per month, manpower to bed ratio (for hospitals), manpower to consult room ratio (for polyclinics), attrition rate per month or quarter or annum, employee contribution per month, average number of work-hours in a month (department wise), average number of sick leaves availed per employee per month and verage number of training hours per employee per month," said he. While speaking on choosing a good team, he suggested, "Be willing to pay a little extra for a better employee and when selecting don't settle for the second best due to an urgency. For emergent situations, use a locum or temp staff and use written and oral evaluation methods. Obtain references at least for middle and senior positions, advocate and follow fair employment and equal opportunity practice and referred candidates should be evaluated stringently."

Satish Bhalerao, GM, HOSMAC India Pvt Ltd, Mumbai spoke on 'Challenges in Healthcare Design'. This session was chaired by Reny Verghese. "The challenges in healthcare design are customer-focused design and approach, integrated planning approach and energy-efficient building design. We need to have integrated planning as there are no standards for hospital buildings in India. Hospital buildings are highly engineered and client's subject understanding is low. More than 50 per cent cost of hospital projects is in the building itself and has interplay of agencies from diverse fields," said he.

EH News Bureau