“WFM threw a lot of challenges to the CIOs’ in terms of management of assets like laptops and other connectivity devices that had to be configured and handed over to the employees who were working from home,” Girish Koppar, GM-IT, Wockhardt Hospitals told ETCIO while discussing the post covid challenges of managing the infrastructure and resource.
According to Koppar, because of the substantial surge in the WFM employees, there was a need to scale up the lease lines /VPN for better performance. Moreover, cyber security had to be managed as the risk of data security had increased considerably due to the distributed workforce. Since the WFM culture hardly existed, resource management of IT support personnel became a challenge as constant support was needed to employees who were working from home.
Managing resources to work in Covid wards was a challenge. “Covid emerged as the best teacher for CIOs as it taught them to set up remote work arrangements, which was well taken by the employees who embraced it as an opportunity to carry their activities seamlessly,” Koppar said.
Digitization
Covid has paved a way to Digitization as the adoption and demand has increased exponentially which was a challenge in the pre-Covid era. Since technology played an integral part in BCP regards to patient engagement and enabling WFM. “The IT department, which was always looked upon as a cost center is now being looked upon as a profit center. Digitization in healthcare has leapfrogged, where the majority of patient engagements with the doctors and payments were done electronically and was more convenient to the patients and doctors,” Koppar said.
Boosting Patient Engagement
Patient engagement and management saw a major change during the Covid times as there was a challenge to travel existing patients needed support and needed to be engaged remotely. Telemedicine, teleconsultation and home care which already existed before covid era but were not practiced came as a saviour. “Covid era witnessed a boom in the Healthcare IT startup space, wherein they developed and implemented IoT which could be easily integrated with the core HIS (Hospital Information System) application. Since it was difficult for a Hospital IT team to develop such an application with limited resources and time, the startup was the natural choice,” he added.
Moreover, these IoT applications not only helped the hospitals to retain their existing patients but also allowed them to engage new patients through Teleconsultation and Home Care application platforms. These advancing applications further helped the hospitals to generate much needed revenue during troubled times.
