MeduComp: Interview from an Indian Hospital Managing Director!

Ever since I started the MeduComp podcast, I have always wondered how the medicine situation works in India, my home country. To quench the knowledge thirst, I wanted to interview a Managing Director of a hospital in India. Well, I got to interview Dr. Chandra Kumar MBBS, Anesthesiologist and Managing Director of KMC Specialty Hospitals in Trichy, Southern India. I posed the same questions I would be asking physicians and their assistants in US to evaluate the situation in both countries. Here, we dive into my Q & A session:

GM: How do you use Computers in your hospital?

CK: Computers have become an integral part of our hospital. We have something called Tele-radiology, which means we conduct CT-Scans from our hospital and the patient is located in another hospital. We have X-Ray reports going to the doctor straight from the lab to the doctor’s lab via the computer network, which helps us save paper and time.

GM: Do the doctors directly access the computer or do have employees access them?

CK: Doctors usually report on paper, which is then summarized by the staff later fed into the database. There is also an Information Technology Department, which takes care of digitalizing the records.

GM: Computer records or Human Created records preferred?

CK: At this point, here in India, we still use human created written records which is then summarized and fed into the computer, as answered in the previous question.

GM: Which is economical? Computer records or Written records?

CK: Given the cost of both hardware and software combined with maintenance and paper and filing cabinets, I would say that at this point written records are economical, but again in the long run, I would say that Computer records might be economical.

GM: When is the earliest record your hospital can pull up?

CK: About 10 years, but, we definitely have digitalized the past 5 years records.

It was surely interview which helped me understand that medicine in India is catching up with the level at which medicine is practiced in the U.S. Although, it will takes couple of years for it to be at par, I think India has come a long way in terms of implementing expensive technology into its medicine. Kudos to small hospitals which are going green in India!