Promoted by Ranbaxy, Fortis Healthcare envisages specialty mother hospitals (heart, ortho, cancer, etc) linked by high-speed leased lines among themselves and to a chain of medical centers.
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Using PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) doctors at the mother hospital will be able to diagnose and treat patients who come to the medical centers. The doctor can see in real-time parameters like ECG and Echo tests on special monitors from Agilent. He can then diagnose and treat the patient, without asking him to come to the mother hospital, which might be a few hundred km away.
As of now, the first hospital has been started at Mohali in Chandigarh (in 2001) and the first few medical centers will be up in Delhi and in Punjab by the end of this year. IT elements at Mohali include a 1 Gb/sec high-speed network, 750 data points and more than 20 Compaq servers and 200 desktops running Microsoft software. It also features a single-window registration process thanks to integrated hospital-, lab- and inventory-management systems. This means that a patient can get his appointment, make payments for consultations, tests and medicines without being sent to different counters.
Benoy George Thomas