Shuvankar Pramanick | Director-IT | Sir Ganga Ram Hospital informs about his digital journey and how it helped during the COVID crisis

What is the operating business model of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital and how all does technology drive this business?
Sir Ganga Ram hospital started 67 years back and the operating model they follow is still what they started with 67 years back. The focus is to have a social welfare thing in their minds. And even in COVID scenario, they are doing the same. Technology in Ganga Ram from the clinical side is very high end. In my experience at all the hospitals that I have worked with, technologically Ganga Ram is far ahead in the clinical side and in the non-clinical side, they are moving into the cloud now. Even being such an old hospital, technically they are much more ahead of different hospitals.
What are the key technology solutions used by Sir Ganga Ram Hospital and what are their use cases?
In the last 1-2 years, the hospital moves into EMR and virtual consultations, and so in COVID their business never suffered. The main focus was to automatee different processes in the systems. They automated the entire ICU. So everything is paperless now in Ganga Ram. We also applied RPAs, ML technology in different processes. For example, bank reconciliation is a very tedious job in any organization and it takes 8-9 hours and so we have automated it through using ML/AI/RPA. This kind of automation has been done in many cases in purchase, in finance, in stores.
We have automated the approval systems of the PO. This is very much effective for the COVID scenario as everyone is in their house and so they can do their official job through mobiles. Technically Ganga Ram started using this technology before the COVID era. There are certain systems like file tracking systems for a patient attendance. Patient attendance can now have the information that where their TPS plans are going, when their TPS will be approved, what is the status of their patient discharge, everything is online.
How have you been driving digital innovations across functions/departments in your organisation?
Digital transformation is functional when you are applying this technology or replacing some processes, which resides in a particular functional area and it is very easy to change. But when the processes are into different functional areas, it should come from top. You cannot drive it alone. You should have a good team and it should come from the top. In Ganga Ram definitely there is a lot of resistance because of the work culture, because of the practices they are doing for the last 50-60 years. So now even our chairman wants that different processes should be digitalized.
What are the key challenges for digital transformation and what would your advice be to counter these challenges?
If you are changing a manual process to the digital process, then resistance will come from the employees or the user itself because they have some sort of apprehension. Secondly the main challenge is like the knowledge and the efficiency of the person who is driving those processes. These are the two main things we faced in Ganga Ram particularly because the cultural renovations are also going on in Ganga Ram. So when I tried to introduce any digitalization in particular processes or cross functional processes, then I faced these two things very strongly. One was employee or end-user apprehension and there are different kinds of apprehensions. The second thing was the quality of the users also. Either we have to identify who are the smart users for that process to succeed to get the digitalization done. In many cases training is the main instrument for us and in many cases changes of process owners is also effective.
What is the internal team structure in Sir Ganga Ram Hospital to monitor and direct tech usage? How are these teams aligned with the business functions?
We have a moderate number of people working over here and our infrastructure is outsourced. In our application, we have some good people some of whom are business analysts. They are champion in the domain itself and they analyze the resistance, they recommended the changes and there are certain developers working over here who developed those things. In some cases, we give it to the outsourced entity and the knowledge transfer to the internal team. That is the way we went forward.
How has been the migration at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital to a cloud-based environment and what has been the security challenges in this journey?
We used limited Oracle Fusion, which is a cloud based ERP. So the entire back office, our financial accounting systems, supply chain, Oracle HCM has been implemented which is totally cloud based. We are using Oracle cloud, which is a high secure cloud. We never think about the security part in that case. Wee choose the best one in that case.
What has been the economic and business impact of COVID19 on Sir Ganga Ram Hospital functioning?
Nowadays it is 30% occupancy whereas in the pre COVID era we had 110% occupancy. So it is a big impact on the Ganga Ram business definitely but we are the first private hospital who is helping the government for COVID patients with 60% bed. Our OPD was closed till sometime but now we have segregated the hospital into two parts i.e. Covid and Non-Covid part. Now we have started the business again, but definitely you can have the idea where the occupancy has been impacted, so business is also impacted in that sense.
How have you been handling your workforce during lockdown?
IT people can do work from their home also. In hospitals we were not allowed to be absent in the last four months. But for our team we had a plan for 50-50% of attendance– 50% employee can work from home and rest 50% will be present. Our infrastructure guide had 100% attendance because they had to come every day and we tried to get a 70%-30% attendance in that case. So in this way, we managed the services. Now it is 100% operational for the IT.
How are digital technologies going to help you to tide over the crisis without significant business disruption?

We have started the digital journey two years back. During the COVID era, we were not affected in that sense like other hospitals. We have automated many processes and it was available on mobile phones. So anyone who is not coming to the hospitals can have the same kind of responsive care at their home also. Crisis management technology definitely helped us in a very extensive way. And if we talk about the business impact, doctors are very much happy with their virtual consultations also. There has definitely been a dent over the business but it was not extensive because they were using the virtual consultations technology.
What is your IT Agenda for 20-21?

In 2021 we had a long list but our CAPEX management is effected now. In 2021, partially we were looking for many business process automations. Secondly, we were also looking for a change of our internal operating systems. These are the two major things which have been affected, and now it will be delayed. But it will be definitely taken care of maybe two quarters of 21-22 or so.