B Swaminathan
Coimbatore: Biju Velayudhan who was the Director of Operations with G.Kuppuswamy Naidu Memorial (GKNM) Hospital is now appointed as the CIO. His role is redefined to concentrate more on strategy and technology management. Biju holds his MBA in Hospital and Healthcare Facilities Administration/Management from Bharathiyar University and Bachelors in Business Administration from Annamalai University specialized on computer applications. Having a deep understanding of healthcare management in the international scenario for more than 20 years, Biju had worked both in India and the Middle East.
Speaking on his new role, Biju says, ” The new role is more of aligning the business, strategy, and technology. The change management of clinical transformation plays a major role in my current role. Most of the hospital’s digital transformation were and are concentrating on the non-medical side for decades. Currently, we are shifting the transformation focus to the clinical side.” According to the technology veteran, the need of the hour is the Clinical Decision Support System (CDDS), Seamless integration of medical equipment, complete health record of any patient. The patient experience, patient education, and clinical intelligence are taking precedence over the typical healthcare practices and my new role will embark on achieving such initiatives.
GKNM Hospital is one of the early adopters of computerization even before 30 years. Apart from computerizing the general areas like registration, finance, billing, inventory, bed management and pharmacy the hospital were the forerunners in the country to integrate all the imaging equipment across the hospital in the year 2004 to get a single repository of images to be viewed, reported and cross-referred across the world.
“We have also completely interfaced all the laboratory equipment which has seamless integration with the Hospital Information System. The implementation of the Pneumatic tube system paved the way for faster movement of laboratory sample, blood products and medicines throughout the hospital. We have more than 1.3 million scanned medical records, which can be viewed by the doctors as soon as the patient arrives in the hospital. In the near future, we are planned to add on the clinical decision support system, clinical intelligence tools and care pathways in the hospital.”, says Biju.
Cyber Security and New Challenges: 
Speaking on the Cyber Security breaches in the healthcare industry, he says the most and common cybersecurity breach is the patient records as far as the healthcare system is concerned. Quoting the reports show that ransomware and other cyber attacks are on the rise and healthcare is one of the biggest targets. “Researchers in Israel announced that they have created a computer virus capable of adding tumors into CT and MRI scans — malware designed to misguide the doctors to wrongly diagnose the high-profile patients. Despite the rising threat, the vast majority of hospitals and physicians are unprepared to handle cybersecurity threats, even though they all handle a major public health problem.”
Speaking on the new challenges, Biju says, ” In the patient care, there is no six sigma, meaning that it is not acceptable to have 3.4 defects or failures on every million patient seen. The world today is highly connected with all the imaging equipment, laboratory equipment, all the continuous vital monitoring stations are connected bi-directionally to the hospital information system. All the patient details are flowing from the equipments seamlessly to the health record of the patient. At this juncture, the most important challenge is to keep running all the equipment or systems 24×7 with complete redundancy.” According to Biju, the security system should be state-of-the-art to make sure there should not be any intrusions in the medical records of the patient. Malware can make the doctor misdiagnose, leading to a catastrophic situation to the patient and the healthcare providers.
Plans ahead:
The hospital is on the journey of complete digital transformation. The hospital is in a plan to get all the medical records seamlessly interfaced with all possible medical equipment. Bringing all the evidence-based clinical practices, clinical/nursing care pathways, clinical decision support system and research using the clinical intelligence tools. This is expected to have a great impact on the way the patient care is given in the hospital and these implementations will be made available by procuring the latest infrastructure.