InterSystems Forays Into Indian Healthcare Market

Sapna Dogra - New Delhi

InterSystems Corporation, one of the leading application platform providers in healthcare, has forged a strategic partnership with MTech India to tap the Indian healthcare market for showcasing its products Cache and Ensemble. Cache is an advanced database system and Ensemble is a universal integration platform, informed Mike Fuller, European director, Marketing, Intersystems, in his recent trip to India.

The Cache post-relational database and the Ensemble integration platform enable the rapid creation and fast integration of high-performance applications. Both are general purpose products, which have met with particular success in the healthcare industry for two reasons, explains Fuller. Cache allows people do very complex high performance applications and provides complete healthcare solutions in primary care, secondary care and community healthcare. It is an object-oriented model and handles complex data relationships, he adds. Cache is used at the majority of major hospitals and labs around the world. In India, Escorts Heart Institute and Research Centre has live Cache system for about a year now. And very recently, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital acquired Cache systems. Early this year, Fortis Hospital-Mohali would adopt the cache database and soon more hospitals will follow suit, informs Aditya Chopra, MTech Systems.

Ensemble chains processes is a co-ordination of not only processes, but also computing, which will helps lower administration costs and also make it very open to patients, so that they can look at their own records, billing etc. through internet.

What makes these systems better than other database systems? “Our systems uses less hardware, so it requires less maintenance and of course it is more cost efficient,” says Fuller, adding, “Also, it is very extensible and you don’t have to have the big band.” He further added that though hospitals build the world class healthcare applications with Cache, but Ensemble is proving to be more interesting to people as there is a need not just to connect applications to applications, which is something done typically with something HL7 version 2.x, 2.3, but it has a patient centric-view of the data. For example if a patient arrives at an accident emergency and then goes to intensive care; in a normal system he will have separate records in each of the systems. However, with Ensemble there will be one record which will be accessible through all systems.

With lot of pioneering work happening in the healthcare, stem cell research for instance, Indian cliniciansl want to own personalised systems. Besides, there will be huge growth in the hospitals of 400 beds and below, which will create a demand for their solutions, avers Fuller.

IT enriches consultants’ decisions, says Fuller,adding that they have the right data in front of them so they can make the right decisions. Unfortunately, one third of consultants in the world make a decision without the proper medical information in front of them, they are guessing and this is a real problem, he laments.