Feature

Sir Ganga Ram Hospital

Priti Pathak profiles some the prime healthcare institutes in Delhi

Sir Ganga Ram Hospital The Hospital was established in 1954 in New Delhi with bed strength of around 100. Today, with 650 beds, around 1,500 patients attend the OPDs every day. The Hospital has a 1:5 bed-employee ratio with 500 doctors.

Growth Path

The Hospital is a multi-speciality teaching and research facility. The focus is mainly on liver and kidney transplantation, gastroenterology and surgical gastroenterology, minimal access and bariatric surgery, assisted reproduction, critical care units, vascular surgery, joint replacement surgery, nephrology, genetic medicine and imaging. "The Hospital is today the largest liver transplant centre in this part of the world. We have by now done around 200 live-related liver transplants and the success of the liver transplant lies in the excellent team and state-of-the-art infrastructure," says Dr BK Rao, Chairman, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital.

The whole body CT scan unit in Delhi was first installed at Sir Gangaram Hospital. Its department of nephrology and renal transplantation pioneered CAPD programme in India. It developed the first dedicated department of minimal access surgery in all of South Asia. One of the surgeons, Dr PK Chowbey, holds the international distinction of the most endoscopic surgical procedures done by an individual.

The Hospital has the distinction of having the first bone bank in India. The Hospital is also a pioneer in phacoemulsification technique under topical anaesthesia. It also has a department of Homeopathy, the first-of-its-kind in a multi-speciality private hospital.

The Hospital has tied up with different hospitals, out of which some in the vicinity of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, which work under their banner and their management is totally by Ganga Ram Hospital. Here in these hospitals they follow the same philosophy and culture which they have in Sir Ganga Ram. The hospitals are city hospital in Old Rajendra Nagar, Jeevan Mala Hospital in Karol Bagh and Healers Hospital in Gurgaon.

IT Interventions

"We have by now done around 200 live-related liver transplants" - Dr BK Rao Chairman Sir Ganga Ram Hospital

The Hospital began using hospital information software about two decades ago in some high volume areas like pharmacy, admission, and billing. "We have now implemented Australian/American hospital information software for all the hospital functions including back office, front office, clinical and support functions. With the implementation of this software, we hope to greatly improve our efficiency, cost containment efforts and patient satisfaction, and facilitate research epidemiology studies and create a database of various disease patterns and causes in India," says Dr Rao.

Further, the hospital is planning a 'RFID tagging system' for its fixed asset management system. Later this year, the hospital would also introduce 'PACS for enterprise-wide imaging'. This 'enterprise-wide PACS' enables imaging specialists to do their primary interpretation work within their own departments and to store the images and reports in a central, multi-disciplinary archive where the information can be accessed by partner institutions, as well as by primary care physicians, using a custom-designed web browser and desktop computers running windows. Every system is integrated with HIS leading to easy availability of data that helps the hospital management make better and informed decisions. The total IT budget we have almost is almost Rs 10 crore.

Accreditations

The Hospital and its consultants have been awarded the highest national awards like Padmabhushan, Padmashree, BC Roy Awards, and other professional and industry awards. The Hospital has been awarded International Outstanding Hospital Award in Community Care and Infection Control Practices and Community Service.

"We hold all relevant ISO certifications and are now ready to acquire the NABH certification from the Quality Council of India. Recently, we have been recognised as a PhD centre by the Guru Gobind Singh University, Delhi. We are the largest Diplomate of National Board (DNB) private training centre in India. We are also the local co-ordination centre for the Royal Colleges of UK for their assessment in surgery and ophthalmology," says Dr Rao.

Other Activities

"We run general OPD and casualty services in all specialities every day, where patients are given free consultations and poor patients are also given free investigations and treatment," says Dr Rao. The Hospital also runs free camps and free medical van services for slum clusters, and operate three free rural medical kiosks in Haryana, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh, each with telemedicine facility. Mobile tele-ophthalmic and mammography units with satellite link are under fabrication for use in various states on a not-for-profit basis.

The Hospital is involved in 80 drug trials, 30 non-drug trials and 84 post-graduate research projects. The Hospital has a training and research centre which spans from post-graduate research projects to post-doctorate research projects (PhD) and clinical, drug, non-drug research facility for improving the understanding of medical science and its application for better living.

"On the training front, we are an extremely sought-after centre for medical, surgical, dental, nursing, physio, rehabilitative, psychology, psychiatric and get management trainees including from SAARC and western countries," says Dr Rao. Around 300 patients come to the Hospital almost every year from countries like the US, the UK, Nepal, Sri Lanka, West Indies, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan.

Focusing on Medical Tourism

The Hospital creates awareness of their facilities, services and quality, through their website and by participation in the various national and international promotional forums and tie-ups with organisations abroad with similar goals. "We also offer a special bouquet of services for international patients to suit their needs. We are receiving a good number of international patients," says Dr Rao.

Challenges and Expansions

With more competitors coming up in the healthcare industry, quality at an affordable price is always a challenge. To deal with it, they have opened a quality cell which works for continuous quality assurance at an affordable price. "We record all our sentinel and adverse events and make it a point not to repeat them in future. We believe in training and retraining of our staff from time to time and our policy is to benchmark our own developments so that every time we perform, we perform the best," says Dr Rao. Due to infrastructural limitations and increasing patient flow, providing beds to all those who need is always a challenge. So for this the Hospital is joining hands with existing nearby hospitals. "Ours is an old organisation and our staff is quite old too, 25-30 per cent of total are almost 20-25 years old employees. With the advent of technology and IT its always a challenge for us to make them techno savvy so that they can be more beneficial to the organisation," informs Dr Rao.

Managing VIPs and other foreign nationals to maintain their privacy and security is also an area of concern. "Initially, capital flow was a problem, but with the formation of board of management comprising senior doctors and their personal intervention to create a corpus, this problem was solved," recalls Dr Rao. The doctors and professionals continue to give direction to the Hospital over the years. The commitment of trustees and management towards achieving excellence in all specialities coupled with maintaining a community interface by providing healthcare to the poor and the indigent has led to consistent growth of the hospital.

"We are looking at other innovative business models, including management and operations tie-up with existing hospitals. We will be adding new high-tech facilities like stem cell centre, robotic surgery and cancer centre and expand our capacity in our existing services and create centres for training and research," informs Dr Rao. The Hospital has expansion plans both organic and inorganic and both options are actively pursued. For the future growth plans, the Hospital has a budget of nearly Rs 80 to Rs 90 crore per annum.