Cloud And Mobility Drives Columbia Asia Hospital

By Ashokkan Somuveerappan, CIO – Columbia Asia Hospital

Cloud enabled the hospital’s entire DR (disaster recovery) posture as a result of which physical hardware footprint in hospitals has reduced. The overall cost of hardware spread across 11 units in the country came down, since a single large repository is available. Cloud has brought down the cost in terms of manageability.

It also helped archive a ‘data on the cloud’ scenario and provide easy and secure access to users. In a normal scenario, the hospital is required to provide ready access to data that is around 3 to 4 years old. The data prior to this period has been archived and can be fetched within 24 to 48 hours. In this perspective, the cloud solution has helped manage archival and DR effectively and in a simpler manner.

On the mobility front, there has been a huge traction as users have now started demanding more. A mobility initiative has been commenced with a diabetic app and the hospital is now focusing on areas like patient’s engagement and doctor’s engagement apps using mobility services that should go live in the first quarter of 2017.

Mobility and cloud is going to be a key area of focus for the industry and will be an extension to Columbia Asia Hospital’s ongoing program. The hospital is also looking at DLP (Data Loss Prevention) systems for all the hospitals. Till now there has been a small information security program in India, which has now been made available across group hospitals and rolled out with information systems policies.

From an overall healthcare perspective, key technologies which will impact the industry are IoT devices, mobility, big data analytics, and imaging intelligence. And obviously big data analytics and imaging intelligence will be powered by high-performance cloud.