Enhancing the Quality of Processes in Healthcare in India

Abstract

Hospitals play a vital role in the health and well-being of people. In recent times there are more patients visiting the hospitals owing to various reasons. In a country like Indian where the hospital to patient ratio is very high it is essential to focus towards improving internal processes in order to attain maximum efficiency levels. With the increasing numbers of cancer and related incidents in India, radiology departments in the hospitals play a critical role in the diagnosis and treatment process. Besides, radiology Department also one of the important source of revenue generation for hospitals. The radiology department can provide services like radiograph, Computer Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging and sonography scans and this has contributed to enhanced diagnosis of patients and consequently improved medical treatment world over. With the increasing numbers of patients visiting the radiology department in hospital followed by lack of advanced support from IT that can be used in radiology, coupled with lack of trained administrative and technical staff has created bottlenecks in the Radiology department's process. This operational bottlenecks or inefficiency increase in the waiting time of patients and report generation time has caused inconvenience and dissatisfaction to the patients and has resulted in inefficient utilization of existing services to a number of deserving patients. In this context, our attempt in this paper is to understand and analyze the requirement of Radiology services in Karnataka and measure the (in) efficiency in terms of process flow and waiting time through a primary survey in a hospital with radiology department in Karnataka. Our results and analysis suggest that there is substantial scope to improve the efficiency of radiology departments in Karnataka that not only help in catering to more patients but also help increasing revenue for the hospitals.