ERP in Healthcare - Impact of Cloud & IoT?

By Niranjan K Ramakrishnan, CIO, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital

Niranjan K Ramakrishnan, CIO, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital

To demonstrate the real value of the investment for adopting the innovations, it is imperative to build a bridge between Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions and Mobility/IoT innovations.

ERP in Healthcare:

• ERP is responsible for integrating all the systems within the hospital through a seamless workflow solution thus enabling all the stakeholders to have a quick access to the clinical, financial, human resources, inventory and administrative data across the hospital.

• Generally, ERP systems have a multi-faceted approach by combining different business functional areas with an integrated database to store various parts of a hospital and increases standardization and reporting capacities using a single and unified platform.

• ERP systems enable the top management of the hospital to gain greater control over planning, budgetting, monitoring, and deciding the performance of the resources to improve the patient satisfaction.

“IoT has the power to convert the conventional ERP system into data intelligent future platform by connecting people, processes, data and things”

Challenges in Healthcare ERPs:

• Branded ERPs are quite expensive

• Cost and complexity of maintaining the ERP in the hospital environment is too high

• Due to the high attrition rate, there is always need for continuous training of new employees

• Majority of the hospitals is using less then 30 percent capabilities of the overall ERP’s value

• Time taken for meaningful implementation is too high which results in scope creep and cost escalation for the ERP software firms

• Lack of standards in Healthcare industry results leaves every implementation with too much of customization requirement, an unique project and not as a box product

• Integration of clinical information systems that capture the revenue information with ERP which primarily captures the expenses, needs to be as seamless as possible but majority of the organizations have a huge data integrity and mismatch issues.

• Data migration from one ERP system to a newer system is the most challenging task for any IT adoption in an hospital environment

Impact of Mobility & IoT in ERP:

“From old school of thoughts where ERPs are meant to be within four walls of the organization as a stand-alone system, new generation ERPs have to be more flexible, data intelligent and real time information exchange – ready solution.”

In other perspective, “The real value of investment of Internet of Things may be realized when whatever the data that was collected from IoT and Mobile applications are fed to ERP for the business intelligent process to analyze and contribute for the future business growth of the organization.”

• Main objective of ERP as a business process management system of an organization is to connect systems of integrated applications that deal with raw data by automating various back office functions related to finance, inventory, technology, services, and human resources

• When the interval of acquired raw data becomes real time using Internet of Things & Mobility, the processed data becomes very useful information and creates very efficient processes

• Sensors, wireless monitors and GPS devices fetch the real time utilization of various systems and relate them with the revenue generated in a ERP system

• When the unstructured data collected from various devices are connected to the ERP’s structured business data for processing and analysing the business value for the organization

• From midnight data snychnization of ERP, IoT and Mobility make real-time access to the data possible that increases the speed and accuracy of data for decision making

• Presenting the right information to the patient, clinician, administrators and other stakeholders was the key objtive of the ERP and with right adoption of IoT and Mobility integreated with ERP, the stakeholders may access the data on their own at appropriate time

• Equipments downtime, misused/unused equipment alerts, real time resource tracking, real time devices utiization in surgeries & procedures etc. enables the outcome analysis of devices, cost analysis and overall performance managenent of the resources made possible with IoT data processed by ERP

• By handshaking with Patient Portals, CRMs, Procurement Portals, Online Payment solutions, Building Management Systems, Complaints Management System and other online applications directly with ERP, an intelligent workflow process would ensure that the Hospital really becomes a SMART Hospital

• This would increase the efficiency, reduce the human resources requirement, improve productivity and strengthen the overall resource management

IoT has the power to convert conventional ERP system into data intelligent future platform by connecting people, processes, data and things in a smart way to facilitate innovative business models and right decisions. From current process and workflow driven business process management systems, IoT enabled ERPs in Healthcare would be event-driven, flexible, intelligent, scalable, data rich and most importanly real time

Based in New Delhi, India, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital is multi-speciality state-of-the-art hospital providing comprehensive Healthcare services. Rebuilt post-independence in 1954, the hospital provides comprehensive medical services.