Established in 2007, Artemis Hospital claims to be Gurgaon’s first JCI and NABH accredited hospital. The 380 bed, state-of-the-art multispeciality hospital is spread across an area of 9 acres. Artemis hospital boasts of a range of advanced equipment in diagnostic, predictive, and therapeutic imaging.
As with any other big hospital, Artemis was also confronted with the problem of managing patients’ medical records. “We had 27,000 files, which included 100 crore pages, related to patients. The hospital had to take up a place on rent just to store them. Storing them in a physical format led to the risk of losing them to fire or any such calamity.
Besides, finding a specific file was a challenge, and more often than not we confronted the traditional excuses of not finding the required file,” Kapil Mehrotra, CIO at Artemis Hospitals says.
Cloud Makes Sense
The hospital needed to act fast to mitigate the bottleneck in maintaining and retrieving the files. Mehrotra started evaluating various. “We needed a solution that was secure, agile, cost-effective, and also met the compliance requirements of the healthcare industry. Also, the resolution of the digital files had to be good. Choosing the right vendor that could meet our needs was therefore a challenge,” he says.
Eventually, Artemis decided to go with Ricoh’s cloud-based Document Management System. The hospital scanned and uploaded all the files on to the cloud. Each file was scanned with six parameters, which included the patient name, his date of birth, his disease, and the doctor treating him.
“During the project, it was important to convey to the service provider what needed to be scanned and what not in each file. To ensure this, the medical records’ team worked closely with the service provider. In the absence of this collaborative effort, the project would have got delayed.”
The entire project took three months to get completed. It was initiated in May 2015, and went live in July 2015.
Direct Savings
By moving on to the cloud, Artemis was successful in saving the rent outgo –a direct impact of Rs 3.6 million on the bottom line. It was a direct saving.
"The product and solution cost was just Rs 6 lakh. Besides, our organization has also become agile. After compression, the file size is only 10-15 KB. We can now pull out any file in just 3 seconds,” says Mehrotra.
As per the MCI (Medical council of India) guidelines, patient records of the last three years had to be available on-premise in a physical format. “Adhering to these guidelines, we made a policy that every year we would add the current year’s record physically and digitize and shred the third year’s documents,” Mehrotra adds.
