Building Business Excellence in Healthcare

Building Business Excellence in Healthcare – Excellent initiatives by Catex Health and CII Institute of Quality

Is healthcare a business? a contentious and provocative question. However, what is universally accepted is that every healthcare establishment needs to be profitable in order to survive, irrespective of its size or nature.

Funds are needed for the following:

Repair and maintenance
Upgrading of technology
Increments for employees
Future expansions
For Offsetting inflation in input costs

Hence, building “Business excellence” in healthcare is a not a luxury but a necessity!

In India, Excellence in healthcare delivery continues to be a major challenge despite tremendous advances made in technology and massive efforts by both public and the private sector players. 5 Macro level issues currently facing the industry include:

Lack of organisation – Healthcare sector is yet to evolve as an organised industry as more than 80% of providers are in the unorganized sector consisting of individual clinics and small hospitals
Epidemic of Chronic and Lifestyle diseases – Also known as non-communicable diseases (NCDs). These diseases required a radically different approach to treatment focused on effective management rather than cure
Increase in patient expectations – The requirements and expectations of patients have increased leading to a demand for greater involvement from doctors in their overall health and not just treatment
Need for higher levels of transparency – Society is consistently demanding greater transparency and more accountability from healthcare providers (HCPs)
Access to quality healthcare – Lack of access continues to be a major challenge for a majority of patients due to serious paucity of trained manpower, affordability and inadequate investment in healthcare infrastructure.

Innovative solutions that impact healthcare delivery by enabling and empowering the industry towards excellence are the need of the hour.

A key lever towards single handedly solving these problems would be to redefine modern medical practice.

Even Today, Medical practice across different types of setups (from stand-alone clinics to large multi-speciality corporate chains) remains the same as it was decades ago. In a drastically different environment can a decades old approach still be relevant and effective?
It is time that we took a long hard look at the practice of medicine and make it relevant for today.

The answer lies in simplicity, we need solutions that focus on the basics. Solutions that cut through the noise of “features and must haves” to those that matter. Two major initiatives that are working on providing such solutions in healthcare are Catex Health and CII Institute of Quality.

Catex Health

Catex Health is redefining medical practice, setting the standard and providing solutions for a model medical practice today. This company established “by doctors for doctors” uses cutting edge technology based services to deliver services and solutions that are sorely required by medical practitioners today. Their services incorporate both clinical and non-clinical requirements to provide a comprehensive solution that has been devised by leading doctors. Catex Health’s services are built around the patient and are ideal for their clinical requirements. They include:

Improving access to doctors through:

Online directory search systems
Comprehensive Appointment management system
Web pages
Video consultations

Creating deep lifelong Doctor- Patient connect via:

Relevant clinical Education
Personalised and specific Instructions
Long-term connect and Follow up

Patient monitoring

Personalised dashboards customised to the patients’ clinical requirements
Integrated clinical devices providing real time monitoring

Medical Record storage

Marketing of doctors

CII Institute of Quality

CII Institute of Quality is actively engaging towards promoting business excellence in the healthcare industry. The focus of CII is to provide practical solutions to all players including individual clinicians, small nursing homes, clinics, diagnostic centres and large hospitals and chains. They are running active interventions based on the Malcom Baldrige model in critically important but neglected areas like:

Leadership
Communication
Use of Systems and Technology
Finance
Service Quality
Human resource
Patient education etc.

Both these organisations are making a mammoth effort in driving business excellence in healthcare, I urge you all to join them in this endeavour so that we can collectively move to the next level of business excellence in healthcare.