write an interview on health care facilities of kerala
Answers
We have achieved this progress in Kerala because of a very good infrastructure of primary healthcare. There has also been a lot of improvement in the secondary and tertiary care. If you look at the last two decades, Kerala had several private hospitals coming in the private sector and has a very good government public healthcare delivery system. So the recognition of the private sector has become a inevitable reality even though there were resistance initially however public health and also how we deliver the care is an important question that we have to ask all over India.
What are the challenges that you see?
As a state policy and as a national policy I would like to see that the central government and the state government give more importance to health in general. In India the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare is under 2 percent. The countries where healthcare is advanced are France, Italy, England, Canada or United States of America and they all have double digits of GDP being spent for health.
An organised approach in this area is very much the need of our country, only then the masses can benefit and affordable healthcare is very important.
The insurance sector has opened up to a great extent to the international players, but only to the Indian insurance companies. A lot of revolution has to happen in this area if we want to see the dream of healthcare for everyone in India. While the private healthcare in India has improved, many corporate chains have come up and also it has extracted many patients from outside.
What are the expansion and growth plans of KIMS?
We are looking for expansion opportunities in India, we have already finalised one in Tamil Nadu and are looking for opportunities in Karnataka. We are looking at not only the primary healthcare but also the aged population which is much more in Kerala and we are trying to double up the home care concept.
There is a lot of scope and need for home care in Kerala and this is one area where we want to specialise and extend it to all the people available. For this we already have central hospitals in various cities and towns, primary centres are there and will be increasing. By this we can drive the home care and we can provide quality care to the population of Kerala.
How is IT placed in KIMS?
We are very much fond of IT in healthcare delivery and we believe that it is the only way that we can go forward. From the very beginning we went into hospital information system. It’s been seven years, we have no out-patient files at all, patients come and just say a medical record number. Recently in Trivandrum we have recently introduced the inpatient electronic medical record. Though there are also a lot of challenges in this because the doctors are to use it, the patients have to accept the value of it and a lot of storage problems are also seen.
We are studying methods by which we can store it in the cloud but that also brings in challenges because the confidentially part is very important. It is not paperless but it is a less paper hospital in many respects.
We are also looking at how we can utilise the telemedicine for management of patients. One of the areas where we want to use telemedicine is as a TeleIntensive care. We are very near in introducing the Tele-ICU system and Telepathology is another area where we want to expand.
Please highlight the role and importance of quality healthcare.
Quality in healthcare is a very important concept. In healthcare, quality in the perception of the patient and measuring that is the major challenge that all of us had. Many of the advanced countries have progressed in it and today India is also progressing in quality and is given utmost importance at KIMS.
We have got performing indices for each department; we have got patient related parameters, like waiting time, satisfaction survey in each of the areas and even with the doctors. Quality is a way of life and it is total quality management that we are practising. It is also very much based on ethics. Ethical practises and ethical principles is a virtue that is not very much practised in healthcare like in many other fields because of the degenerating values of our society in this point of time.