Apollo, IBM launch 'Health Hiway'

Bangalore, Apr 12: IT major IBM and Apollo Hospital Group today announced a joint go-to-market initiative to build a National Health Data Network called 'Health Hiway' to provide a diverse set of software applications for the healthcare segment.

Conceptualised and developed by Apollo, based on IBM's IT infrastructure, the Health Hiway initiative would facilitate the roll out of hosted applications that were of global standard in class point solutions that would impact on the hospitals' clinical and financial performance.

The initiative was mainly aimed at the mid segment hospitals of 50 to 200 beds. IBM would provide the hardware, middleware and services infrastructure, while Apollo would offer its healthcare domain expertise.

The easy to use package provide IT application to create, store, manage and share clinical, administrative and financial information access knowledge resources to enhance performance of hospitals.

Briefing newspersons, Mohammed H Naseem - VP, Healthcare IBM India said the IT spend by hospitals worldwide ranged between one to two per cent of their total expenditure, while it was just 0.25 per cent in India. There were 1500 mid sized hospitals in the country and the recent boom in healthcare had resulted in 500 such hospitals being added every year.

''Other than a few big hospitals who have implemented IT, most others are grappling with too much choice and very little understanding to evaluate options. The IBM-Apollo initiative could offer efficient and effective solutions,'' he said.

Ashwani Srivatsava, President - Strategic Solutions, Apollo group, said the standard based and common platform initiative was an effort to offer the industry the best practices of IT service in health care.

UNI