Even if the in-house pharmacy in a hospital/clinic stocks most of the common remedies, there are likely to be unforeseen situations where an essential drug is unavailable and has to be obtained from external sources thereby delaying treatment. Moreover, in-house pharmacies may not help patients visiting the hospital/clinic from remote areas. It is obvious that pharmacies nearest to the patients' location can serve them in the best possible manner.
A similar situation exists with in-house clinical laboratories. It is not always efficient to equip in-house laboratories with "all" necessary test infrastructure as this may have a direct impact on capacity utilization. Again, proximity of the lab to the patients' location is key to ensure timely delivery of services.
This is true when it comes to specialization of doctors as well. There are a number of practical issues in providing consultation rooms and associated infrastructure for practitioners of various specializations to come to the hospital/clinic regularly. It is common to see both doctor and patient commute from the same location to the hospital, just because the doctor is available for consultation at the specific hospital at a given time. In addition, obtaining 2nd/3rd opinion from external sources can be a cumbersome process in the absence of adequate networking and communication capabilities.
Virtual Hospitals/Clinics:
HealthLink's cutting edge technology enables superior networking capabilities that can be leveraged by hospitals/clinics to extend their reach and serve customers better. HealthLink is designed in such a way that hospitals/clinics need not have to have all facilities including pharamacies and laboratories in-house. Even where in-house infrastructure is available, facilities can be extended much beyond the geographical location of the hospital/clinic building.
HealthLink enables networking of hospitals/clinics with
- pharmacies
- laboratories and
- practitioners
in any location. Hence, a group of practitioners, pharmacies and labs can work together as a single Virtual Hospital/Clinic and serve patients in much more efficient manner than would have been the case if all these were located physically together.
Using HealthLink, a hospital/clinic can set-up a panel of practitioners of their choice, which has the following advantages.
- All members of this panel of practitioners would have access to electronic health records of patients in the hospital/clinic.
- Being a cloud-based solution, HealthLink enables practitioners review these records at flexible time and be better prepared for patient consultations.
- Patients from remote locations can meet the practitioner closest their location instead of commuting to the hospital/clinic building.
- Expert opinion where required from external sources can be sought with minimal time lag thanks to the networking capability that facilitates sharing health records.
- Hospital/Clinic's electronic health record acts as single source of reference for all members of the practitioners' panel thereby eliminating dependency of health history narrated by patients.
- Practitioners in a panel of a hospital/clinic will have access not only to the in-house pharamcy and lab but also to external pharmacies and labs that are part of the hospital/clinic's network.
Hospitals/clinics can connect with pharmacies of their choice using HealthLink. Therefore - Whenever practitioners in the panel of the hospital/clinic prescribe remedies, these pharmacies would receive the prescriptions instantly. - Pharmacies can then arrange for supply of remedies at the shortest time. - Issues such as non-availability of stocks can be addressed swiftly instead of waiting for the patient to commute to the pharmacy and present the prescription.
In addition, hospitals/clinics can connect with laboratories of their choice on HealthLink. This means that-Here again, prescriptions from practitioners of the hospital/clinic are directly forwarded to laboraties in the hospital/clinic network, which can be acted upon instantly. Tests can be automatically scheduled along with prescriptions. Laboratories can deliver reports on HealthLink which would be instantly available to the practitioners' panel for review and treatment planning. This capability eliminates the need for commutes by the patient for collecting reports and presenting them to the practitioners.
HealthLink's networking capability facilitates supplementing lab infrastructure by enabling networking with external laboratories where equipment are unavailable in-house.
HealthLink eliminates the need for elaborate infrastructure in hospitals/clinics and thereby reduces initial investments as well as operating costs for the hospital/clinic management. In addition, HealthLink's networking capability helps greatly enhance efficiency of healthcare delivery.