Max Healthcare leverages mobile-first strategy and analytics

All the enterprise digital projects driven at Max Healthcare have a clear business vision and analytical dashboards to measure and drive ongoing operational improvements on business-defined metrics, remarks Sumit Puri, Chief Information Officer, Max Healthcare. “We have always been cognizant of our patients’ priorities and one critical yet common sentiment that stood out was the need for a shorter hospital-stay. With our deep belief in ‘Eager to get you home’ – the stated vision of Max Healthcare – we concentrate on simplifying the patient’s journey at our hospitals. We aim to address every possible challenge – from a shorter hospital stay to minimising the roadblocks during discharge and other related aspects. We have reinvigorated our efforts towards streamlining the workflows and digitising the processes for admission, billing and discharge for all our patients. The key focus areas are enhancing patient safety and customer experience by leveraging technology to enhance all interaction touch points of Max Healthcare services.” he says.

Max Healthcare is already one of the most digital hospital chains in the country today with singular, well-integrated systems running across the hospitals which helps immensely in creating a unified 360-degree view of patients.

“We deeply believe in enhancing reach and access to our customers and are focusing on extending Max@Home service lines like physiotherapy, phlebos, nurses, x-ray at home for holistic care of our patients. The key focus areas are enhancing patient safety and experience during all interaction touchpoints with Max Healthcare services,” Puri states.

Digital transformation entails a new way of doing business where all aspects pertaining to people, process, and technology need to be aligned to business transformation. Puri further states that to carry out effective digital transformation at Max Healthcare, it is critical for to identify the business drivers and benefits associated with the IT projects and ensure complete business ownership on the same.

Reducing the waiting time and enhancing customer experience
Max Healthcare is embracing a mobile-first strategy with self service portal and mobile applications in order to enhance customer convenience and reach out to customers before they feel the need to reach out to the hospital.

One of Puri’s transformational digital projects is the ‘Patient self-service’, a mobile application and web portal. Available on iOS and Android platforms, the application enables patients to access their medical information and book a whole range of services with Max Healthcare. It allows patients to avail discounts, view their historical and current medical reports, access e-prescription statements, link their family members, or book appointments, Max@Home services and emergency ambulance services using the web or mobile platforms.

The application provides the doctor with a complete view of the patient’s medical history, which has reduced the time spent by doctors while searching for the reports. It has also reduced the waiting time. The application also notifies the doctor when the patient steps in the hospital.

Further, the mobile application would help in creating a digital locker for patients and their family members by enabling them to upload their medical records of Max or other hospitals in a centralised place. The digital lockers will facilitate healthcare data exchange and allow a better understanding of the medical condition with superior quality of care, administered by clinicians.

The application also enables patients to make SOS calls for emergency, where Smart Ambulance and Bike Ambulance services are expected to reach customers in NCR within 15-30 minutes. Besides optimising reach time of ambulances using Google Maps, Max Healthcare is enabling point of care diagnostics to transfer patient vitals and clinical information to a centralised command centre for stabilising the patient while in transit.

“This timely deployment of ambulances has helped save almost 130 lives in the last year. The primary outcome we are expecting from these digital initiatives is enhanced patient safety and improved customer experience as we enable access to real-time information,” says Puri.

Leveraging analytics to deepen customer relationships
Analytics is the bedrock and key to deeper customer relationships. Leveraging analytics and insights is clearly the way to transform future healthcare delivery. Puri explains, “We are one of the few corporate hospitals which have deployed integrated singular systems like e-prescription, Hospital Infromation System, CRM and electronic healthcare records, while embracing standards like ICD10 for clinical diagnosis across our network of hospitals. In order to institutionalise continuous improvement culture, we have created key operational and clinical metrics to constantly track and improve performance.”

The hospital is piloting several innovative technologies like step-down ICU care and predictive analytics for myocardial infections in cardiac patients to predict the risk of re-admission, which is helping to enhance patient safety and reduce the cost of re-admission. The hospital chain has deployed several machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence tools for improving the productivity of radiologists in diagnostics and has also piloted speech-to-text and natural language processing (NLP) to enhance structuring and analysis of e-prescription data, which will further improve patient outcomes.

Puri adds, “The pre-requisite of success is to speak the language of business and drive IT initiatives using business defined goals and metrics to enable achievement of desired business outcomes. Over the coming years, we hope to further leverage new emerging technologies like AI, IoT, cloud and big data analytics to incubate new digital-based operating models and analytics to enhance the experience, patient safety, cost efficiency and revenue growth for the organisation. The primary goal is to work on these initiatives in order to enable transparency and more affordable healthcare costs for our patients.”