G. Radhakrishna Pilai, CIO, SRL Ranbaxy Ltd., in conversation with Biztech2.0, discusses the rise in IT adoption and technology trends in the Healthcare industry.

Do healthcare companies realise the criticality of IT and invest accordingly? How critical is IT to your daily operations?

The concern is that IT investment in the healthcare vertical is very low. The pharmaceutical companies started as early movers in IT adoption. Now other companies in the healthcare vertical are also moving in that direction. The main reason for the low IT adoption in this vertical was the unorganised manner of implementation. This is because only standalone hospitals or small labs adopted IT systems.

Now larger organisations, like SRL Ranbaxy, have realised the benefit of IT. Today SRL is totally dependent on IT. The reason being, even if a physical sample is expected and if my IT infrastructure is not up-and-running, the lab will not be able to register it, allocate jobs to different departments, process the data or deliver reports to the client. Thus our end-to-end operations are IT dependent.

Can you outline SRL Ranbaxy’s Disaster Recovery Plan?

We currently have DR implemented at different levels. To start with, all our labs have primary and secondary servers to enable them to function in case one server fails. We also consolidate data to a central location, enabling technicians sitting in any part of the country to access this data. This also constitutes a separate layer in our DR plan.

Apart from these steps, we have a central back-up system, where data is stored on-site as well as off-site and protected by fireproof cabinets.

We are also in the process of setting up a DR site in Delhi, which should be operational in the next four to six months.

Can you shed light on some emerging technology trends in the healthcare vertical and are you evaluating any?

Most of the technology trends have started in the BFSI segment, whereas healthcare was a little shy in IT adoption, but is now catching up.

In the healthcare vertical, there has been quite a bit of hype surrounding virtualisation of IT infrastructure and Business Intelligence (BI). I believe that there is a sense of urgency where BI is concerned. In addition to BI, consolidation is very important. When you have a lot of data available, you have to utilise it, else all that data is of no use to any organisation. Thus BI is a trend that is going to see large user adoption in the healthcare vertical.

After consolidation, we realised that we are sitting on a huge bank of data. Unless we get some information out of it, this data is useless. Thus our first priority is to implement a Business Intelligence (BI) solution so that we can use it for predictive analysis to support future growth.

Since we are in the healthcare vertical and have a lot of scientific information available, we can conduct research if this data is utilised properly. We have a separate department set up to handle this aspect. Thus, the next priority is to help this department analyse data to boost decision-making ability.

IP telephony is another area of interest as we are exploring the possibility of using tele-pathology solutions. Image processing is another technology that we are interested in. We are exploring numerous possibilities, but unless the technology is affordable as well as viable for our business, we will not implement it just to follow a trend.