Author: Dileep V S

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Ayurveda & EHR Knowledge Yoga & EHR

Compelling Reasons Why Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy Needs to adopt Information Technology

Globally, there are over 500,000 practitioners of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy. This statistics makes it one of the most prevalent systems of medicine and in India, its significance is something phenomenal. Despite its prominence, a more digitized and streamlined way patients’ data is stored, managed and retrieved is still missing. On the contrary, western medicine have integrated chests of patient information systems that is available to clinicians and doctors, allowing them to virtually know an individual’s medical record. However, Ayurveda still awaits a call for integrated technologies and solutions. On this article, we will delve into why Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy needs to adopt information technology to bring about significant changes.

The 3 most widely used tools in healthcare and their advantages are as below

Hospital Information System(HIS)

One of the major advantages of integrating HIS with Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy healthcare practices is that it paves way for seamless everyday operation. It allows clinicians to set reminders, tasks and alerts for patients and enable better engagement with them. For instance, sending out appointment reminders a day prior to the actual date, send follow-ups through emails or phone calls, reminders to schedule appointment for patients’ next visit, and more.

Besides, it also fosters a better supply-chain ecosystem, where your inventory of supplements are better monitored and maintained. HIS solutions are designed to keep track of your item dispenses and intimate you the expiring and low-on-stock items. These are the two major aspects when it comes to managing a clinic and those that require a lot of paperwork and efforts. HIS can give you real-time information on reports such as aging reports, summaries of supplies dispensed, reports on your services, trends, customer account statements and more.

Digitizing them and bringing all of them to one single portal makes operations interoperable. It also betters your engagement with patients by allowing you to send newsletters, information on any upcoming events, research or promotions, birthday emails and more.

Electronics Health Records (EHR)

EHR is a digital repository of patients’ health record. When you integrate a solution for your Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy healthcare practices, you create an environment for improved practice performances and measurement of key metrics. The analytics modules allow you to find meaningful insights on patients’ record and give you real-time information on the progress of treatment, trends in key diagnostic parameters, overall disease trends across patients and also decision support tools.

Customer Portal

Having a patient portal is inevitable today. It not just ensures a better healthcare practice but also allows you to formulate better treatment agendas and plans. Since this is centralized, any clinician or a practitioner of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy can retrieve a patient’s health record and plan out medications and treatments. With the massive chunks of information on the patient in hand, the clinicians would also be able to make better and informed decisions and see trends through the solution’s analytics portal.

When information technology is rightly incorporated, you will experience better management of data and operations and find aspects for improvement in administration, patient engagement and healthcare practices. The technology is efficient, cost-effective and is inevitable today that will go on to become revolutionary tomorrow. With the renewed focus once again on Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy as mainline healthcare practices, it is important that the proponents leverage technology to ride this wave and take their crafts far and wide.

AyushEHR is a standards compliant EHR with integrated customer portal. To get a personalized advantages list of how an EHR and customer portal can work wonders for your organization, speak or get in touch with us.

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Knowledge

A Beginner’s Guide to Electronic Health Record

 

One of the primary goals of tech revolutions is to offer convenience to people. Apart from making way for elevated and sophisticated lifestyles, ideal evolution of technology is where it works at the grass root levels and makes lives better for those who are in need of it. Driver-less cars, smart refrigerators and automated homes are essential but smart farming, autonomous power grids and digitized healthcare are necessities. Thanks to the advancements recently, healthcare has been significantly influenced by technology and one such offspring is an EHR or the Electronic Health Record.

What is an EHR?

In simple words, an Electronic Health Record is a digital version of your health record or your medical history. Instead of storing the data on paper and retrieving it during medical consultations, an electronic health record offers you the convenience of saving your data digitally over the cloud. Since it gets stored on a centralized portal, it becomes easy for clinics and doctors to retrieve your medical history and proceed with diagnosis or healthcare.

One of the most significant advantages of the electronic health record include the inclusion of data such as the following:

  • Radiology reports
  • Laboratory data
  • Immunizations
  • Past individual medical history
  • Vital Signs
  • Medications
  • Earlier Diagnosis
  • Progress notes
  • Demographics and more

Besides, the electronic health record also automates the flow of data and helps clinics streamline their workflows. Apart from healthcare, the health record fosters the evolution of a clinic’s operational procedures including data-driven decision making, outcomes reporting, quality management and more.

The Pros of Electronic Health Records

Apart from allowing doctors, physicians and clinics to deliver better diagnostic services to patients, electronic health records allows for improved healthcare by significantly reducing the occurrence of medical errors. With accurate and most recent data in hand, there is little scope for errors or misconceptions in diagnosis.

Besides, electronic health records also save significant time and strain of patients by eliminating the need to scan or undergo tests again and preventing any delays in treatments. With a streamlined electronic health record in hand, you can ensure you receive systematic services regardless of which clinic or specialist doctor you intend to get diagnosed from. With the record, the doctor will quickly take up the role of a ‘family doctor’ by knowing your medical history and recent ailments, allowing him or her to offer better diagnosis.

Electronic Health Records in Indigenous Medical Practices

Generally, electronic health records have been tested and applied in conventional medical practices. Little efforts have been taken in applying the benefits of electronic health records in the indigenous medical practices such as Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy. These medical practices require as much medical information about a patient as clinics do and for better and informed treatments, clinics practicing them require a centralized portal to retrieve the piece of information.

Naturopathy centers, Yogic healing centers and Ayurveda clinics can opt for electronic health records systems to deliver better services to individuals or patients who prefer the treatment practice and develop better treatment agendas for their wellbeing.

With an effective electronic health record in place, resorts, clinics, hospitals and medical colleges can work on delivering better healthcare treatments to patients and guests. To know how it can benefit your clinic or business, get in touch and we will help you out.

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Knowledge

What is OpenEHR?

OpenEHR Block diagramOpenEHR is a virtual community of technology and clinical domain professionals working on developing specifications for ensuring Universal Inter-operability of all electronic health data. It’s approach is multi-level, single source modelling within a service-oriented software architecture, in which dynamic models built by domain experts(Archetypes & Templates) and stable information model built by technologists exist at different levels within the application. Using OpenEHR specifications, it is now possible to build an EHR repository independently of content specifications enabling a new generation of EHR systems that routinely adapts to new requirements.

The international library of openEHR archetypes (CKM) currently contains about 500 archetypes and 6,500 data points which have been modelled by clinical professionals and health informatics experts without any technological knowledge of the final EHR systems.

Our EHR.Network cloud EHR platform is build on OpenEHR RM and so can incorporate any clinical model built using OpenEHR specification.

For more information, please visit OpenEHR website.

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Knowledge

What is SNOMED CT?

SNOMED CT is the acronym for Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms. It is a collection of more than 350,000 terms and phrases (referred to us concepts in SNOMED) that are popularly used in clinical practice across the world. Apart from allowing coding of unstructured textual data to make it computable, SNOMED also allows translation of the concepts to other languages, thus making the clinical data inter-operable across countries, regions and languages.

As per SNOMED International it:

  • Is the most comprehensive, multilingual clinical healthcare terminology in the world
  • Is a resource with comprehensive, scientifically validated clinical content
  • Enables consistent, processable representation of clinical content in electronic health records
  • Is mapped to other international standards
  • Is already used in more than fifty countries

When implemented in EHR applications, SNOMED CT can be used to represent clinically relevant information consistently, reliably and comprehensively as an integral part of producing electronic health information.

Using SNOMED CT

SNOMED CT is IP protected and needs a license for use. As India is a member of SNOMED International, it is free for use inside the country.

HealtheLife, being and affiliate licensee, is authorised to integrate and distribute SNOMED CT along with our software offerings. We are also authorised to extend it for use with Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy. So your AyushEHR subscription license includes the use of SNOMED CT also.

For more information please visit SNOMED International website.

 

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Healthelife news

AyushEHR Software Solution for Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy @Advantage Healthcare 2017

Ayush EHR our Solution for Ayurvedic, Yoga and Naturopathy Practitioners was demonstrated during the recently concluded Advantage Healthcare Event from October 12 to 14 2017, at Bangalore International Exhibition Centre. The FICCI event was focused on accelerating the growth of Medical Value Travel from current 15% to 25% to make it a 9 Billion USD industry by 2020.

The Exhibitors at the event included multi-specialty hospitals, medical value travel operators, Ayurvedic, Yoga and Naturopathy Centres and Government Agencies such as AYUSH, Tourism and NABH.

We connected with AYUSH practitioners who visited and exhibited and invited them for a demo of our offering. We received positive feedback and will follow-up in the coming weeks. A second segment that we connected were the Medical Value Travel Operators, there was key interest from multiple players in the segment to move up the value chain by offering EHR based service to their customers. The third segment of players we met were companies offering health care services starting from market place to connect individuals to wellness providers to IOT based home care solutions. Health information management using our standards aligned, inter-operable EHR.Network platform was explored.

Overall in spite of the heavy rains in Bengaluru, we were heartened by the footfall and interest shown by visitors to our booth. We have generate good leads and hope to get early customers for our AYUSH EHR.

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Healthelife news

Healthelife to exhibit at Advantage Healthcare 2017 on Oct 12 to 14

We will be participating in the Advantage Healthcare 2017 on Oct 12 to 14. We are part of the Startup Karnataka team and will be displaying at Table #2 in the Startup Pavilion, Hall 2.

Consistent with our plan of business, we will again be focusing on the AYUSH EHR in this event as well. The solution has matured quite a bit since we first demonstrated in Elevate100 and is ready for live deployment.

Current functionality covers the main guest centric workflow from information gathering, care process and post discharge engagement and will help streamline information sharing and process efficiency inside the organizations.

We invite all AYUSH providers and healthcare partners to visit us. For one-on-one meetings please contact us.

You can visit our website for more information on AYUSH EHR

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Healthelife news

Healthelife awarded runner up in Elevate100 event by Karnataka government

We are very happy to share news of our participation in Elevate 100. After an initial screening round on Aug 5th we reached the final 250 from an initial 1700 applications. The guidelines provided for presenting to the grand jury helped structure our thoughts and led to multiple rounds of constructive internal meetings.

The final pitch to the grand jury was on Aug 29th. The questions from the jury on our market approach was very useful and it made us internalize that for a startup focus on a select market segment was critical.

We are upbeat about our participation in Elevate 100 and look forward to be part of upcoming initiatives from the Government of Karnataka and Government of India.

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Healthelife news

Healthelife exhibits it’s AYUSH EHR at Elevate100 demo pod – 29th-30th August 2017

We were selected to exhibit at the Demo pod at Elevate 100 on Aug 29th and 30th.

In the stall, we focused on demonstrating our AYUSH EHR solution and finding technology partners from the Healthcare sector for our EHR.NETWORK Platform. We had a very good footfall and were able to generate some very good leads from the event. Our young team of developers also got a first hand experience to meet potential customers and evangelize our offering.

The feedback from visitors to our pod was very positive and further validated our ideas. Based on the feedback received from many people who visited us, we have started work on EHR.STORE, the personal EHR store for individuals. We plan to make EHR.STORE widely available in the next 2-3 months so that individuals can start storing their health data on our EHR.NETWORK platform.

We also received interest from investors and incubation centres such as Sandbox by Deshpande foundation. Exploratory discussions are on with many to identify possible engagements.

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Knowledge

Person Activation Measure(PAM) – Metrics to improve your ability to maintain overall wellness

Standards compliant Electronic Health Records(EHR) platform

There is growing recognition, across the world, of the urgent need to shift healthcare system from being reactive to becoming proactive, from being focused on curative to driving wellness. Current provider-centric approach is designed with the curative approach and delivers poor customer experience, poor quality and high cost outcomes.

To drive adoption of modern wellness concepts, health services will need to be more effectively integrated around the individual rather than being organised around the provider and delivered in a siloed and fragmented way, unable to meet person’s expectations of quality and result. To trigger change in this way, a new set of metrics is needed to measure success, measures that needs to reach beyond the standard “sickness and repair” metrics and allow us to know how well a person is.

One such metric is the Person Activation Measure(PAM), that measures an individual’s knowledge, skill and confidence for managing his/her overall health and wellbeing. This paper mentions that “PAM has been shown to be a better predictor of health outcomes than known socio-demographic factors such as ethnicity and age. More activated people are more likely to attend screenings, check-ups, and immunizations, to adopt positive behaviours (e.g. diet, substance abuse, and exercise), and have clinical indicators in the normal range (e.g. blood sugar levels (A1c), blood pressure and cholesterol)”

Studies using the PAM have also noted that positive PAM scores are correlated with non-health outcomes. For example, workplace studies highlight a relationship between person activation, job satisfaction and absenteeism. Judith Hibbard notes in her paper “As such, patient activation may be tapping into a concept that goes beyond health”.

Insignia health has classified a person’s PAM levels as below

  1. Disengaged and overwhelmed – Individuals are passive and lack confidence. Knowledge is low, goal orientation is weak, and adherence is poor.
  2. Becoming aware, but still struggling – Individuals have some knowledge, but large gaps remain. They believe health is largely out of their control, but can set simple goals.
  3. Taking action – Individuals have the key facts and are building self-management skills. They strive for the best practice behaviors, and are goal-oriented.
  4. Maintaining behaviour and pushing action – Individuals have adopted new behaviors, but may struggle in times of stress or change. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is a key focus.

It has been shown in the earlier quoted King’s Fund paper by Judith Hibbard that improvements in PAM allow people to become good managers of their own health. Studies of interventions to improve PAM show that persons with the lowest activation scores tend to increase their scores the most, suggesting that effective interventions can help engage even the most disengaged.

Useful links :

  • Patient activation and PAM FAQs
  • Patient Activation Measure – Wikipedia
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Healthelife news

Healthelife closes IRS 90 lakh seed funding to cover operation expenses for the next 10 months

Standards compliant Electronic Health Records(EHR) platform

We are very happy to announce the successful completion of IRS 90 lakhs seed funding. This investment is to be used to cover the operational expenses for the next 10-12 months. We plan to deploy this fund primarily for product development and secondarily for creating market traction for our solutions. The traction that we generate using this seed fund should enable us to tap into much larger investments for growth and acceleration a year down the line.

We announced this fund raising program in November 2016 with an aim of generating 70-80 lakhs. It was offered as private placement only to known people and close associates, who had been following the company from the beginning. The overwhelming response enabled us to increase our target to 100 lakhs and in the end we ended up with a final investment of 92.5 lakhs.

The offer was formally closed by the end of January 2017 and fund collection completed by end February 2017. We have started deployment of the funds starting with the augmentation of the product team.

The product team is projected to grow from the current 10 full time + 4 interns to 15-20 full time employees, with the main addition happening in the JAVA backed. Market outreach is another area of focus and the progress over the past couple of months have been very +ve. Apart from the in house commercial offerings, we have also making inroads in to the social and public health areas, thanks to associations with EHRC and other healthcare professionals active in the public health domain.

We thank all our investors and well wishers for their support and trust and assure you that we would do our best to live up to your expectations. The next 12 months will be crucial for the company and going by the progress so far, we are very upbeat.