Crm Data Conversion

Data Conversion

The first major task was data conversion. The four systems from which data had to be retrieved were a commercial out patient system, a commercial accounting system, an in-house in-patient system and a document management system (DMS)...

Training

Another important task was training the 1200 hospital personnel and 200 physicians. Training was imparted by GCS staff in association with Bumrungrad's education and training department...

Hardware and Software

The hardware for Hospital 2000 comprised 450 Dell Optiplex PC's (clients), with a 400 MHz Celeron processor with 64-128 MB Read Access Memory (RAM), 4 Pentium®-III XeonTM-based Dell Power Edge 6300 Clustered Servers and a Dell Power Vault 650F Fibe Channel storage system...

System Architecture

The Hospital 2000 IS was built on a three-tier architecture, comprising PC-based clients, clustered servers and the database (Refer Exhibit III for a diagram of the system architecture.)...

END GAME

There has been a 40% increase in patient volume at BH since 2000, with a 33% gross margin in 2003 (up from the low 20s a few years earlier). There has been no need to increase back office or IT staff numbers to accommodate the increased numbers of patients.

From its two million active patients, the hospital handles 850,000 outpatient visits yearly, with the average visit taking just 45 minutes, including registration, treatment, diagnostic procedures, pharmacy and bill paying!

Medical errors and infection rates have fallen. The central database holds 35 million scanned images and is adding around 10,000 a day. In part because of its billing efficiency, the hospital collects about 93% of its charges, "Before we had electronic records, we had 30 people running our medical records department. We retrained those people, and now we're getting much more value from them, and they have a much higher rate of job satisfaction." The IT system reports 99.99% reliability.

The information system helps BH attract and retain doctors. IT makes it easier for the clinicians to practice high-quality medicine. Physicians can see so much more on an electronic health record than on a paper record.

One lesson seems to be that a step-change transformation has a better chance of success, and is cheaper in the long term, than incremental change. Adding a new element to an existing large IT system can cost around US$100,000 each time after interfacing costs, training and so forth have been covered, and it could be argued that a system that has grown through elements being added is less stable and always operates in a less than ideal way.

BH's