Yes it is true. Indian healthcare industry is yet to mature. Barring Tier I hospitals, majority of them do not have sufficient infrastructure to support IT. Best practices and product specifications have not been standardized. The CEOs and decision makers are yet to see IT as a business value enabler.
All these challenges make it difficult for an HMIS vendor to deliver a successful implementation. But again, it is these challenges that make our work as a healthcare IT provider more interesting. We being a part of the industry for a decade now have dealt with a number of hospitals with varied degrees of IT ready infrastructure. To work around this, we follow the best practices defined by the industry. We access the infrastructure available in the hospital in the pre implementation phase. We then list out the additional infrastructure required for implementation. Bringing these to notice of the hospital early, help them prepare for the implementation better. This also cuts down our chances of failure in implementation at a later stage. While evaluating the infrastructure we adopt a futuristic approach. This is to ensure the hardware (servers for instance), prescribed by us are able to manage the patient load even in future.
Finally, a word of caution! It is important for an HIS vendor to stand by the requirement provided initially, throughout the project. Budget inflations are mostly bad news in the hospital world.
