July 2022 | 1006 words | 4-minute read
In the post-crisis world, humans have made vital changes in the way they do several things. At the top of this list of changed behaviours is healthcare and how patients access it. The challenges posed during the lockdown pushed hospitals to spruce up their online offerings — telemedicine, video consultations, online patient care, and digital record keeping, to name a few.
Tata Elxsi’s newest offering addresses this growing digital trend in healthcare through its omnichannel solution — TEngage, a provider-centric and fully integrated solution. Covering the entire gamut of a patient’s journey from medical information, doctor consultation, scheduling of diagnostic tests, medical record maintenance, insurance claim and bill processing, to pharmacy and delivery of medicines, TEngage is made available on a single portal as per the role, making it easy for all the stakeholders — be they doctors, patients or hospital staff.
“Hospitals are no longer assessed on the number of beds they provide but rather by the number of patients’ records they can maintain and service effectively. Apart from in- and out-patients, virtual consultations have gone up in the pandemic,” says Ajay Sathyanarayana, practice head – Digital Health, Tata Elxsi, adding, “TEngage, by offering a comprehensive healthcare management solution, aids hospitals in implementing healthcare services efficiently.”
Why TEngage
Every hospital has its own set of processes. Some hospitals ask patients to pay up-front, and then avail of the services; still others might render some initial services before asking to pay the sum. Even insurance claim settlement processes differ, as do doctor consultation, medical record-keeping, and others.
While designing TEngage, Tata Elxsi has taken all these aspects into consideration by sweating out the details in understanding the workflow, processes, and other offerings, to make it convenient for hospitals to transition to a digital healthcare system.
"Various products cater to different aspects of the patient treatment and care circle; in fact, a plethora of solutions flood the market. With TEngage, we have created a single integrated platform that considers the complete patient journey and offers a comprehensive solution.”—Ajay Sathyanarayana, practice head, Digital Health, Tata Elxsi
A fully customisable solution, TEngage can be easily tailored to fit the hospital workflows. “We don’t separate the app out instead we seamlessly integrate with the hospital system, which aids healthcare providers in job efficiency,” says Mr Sathyanarayana. “Various products cater to different aspects of the patient treatment and care circle; in fact, a plethora of solutions flood the market. With TEngage, we have created a single integrated platform that considers the complete patient journey and offers a comprehensive solution.”
Features
Improved quality control. TEngage can be customised to align with the hospital’s branding and quality control guidelines and requirements for products and solutions. “The uniform look and feel across interfaces exudes confidence, especially among patients,” says Mr Sathyanarayana.
Maintaining data privacy. As TEngage deals with the medical, health and insurance records of patients, it has stringent and in-built data protection requirements, which are in accordance with region-specific data privacy regulations that are as per the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) guidelines and specifications. TEngage thus provides secure access to a patient’s medical and health data, with rules governing who can access, use and transmit it.
Data storage options. TEngage offers the option to host the data locally on servers or on the cloud, thereby aligning with a hospital’s data storage policies.
Configurable for different geographies. Every geography has specific rules and regulations for the healthcare sector. Launched primarily for the US and India markets, TEngage is easily configurable to meet the healthcare rules and regulations, as well as hospital-specific requirements, of different geographies.
“The US market is heavily standardised and unified under a centralised system with constantly changing government regulations. In such a scenario, TEngage offers more than just all aspects of workflow maintenance; it runs through their insurance schemes, medicare, government facilities, everything along with the regulations that must be taken into consideration,” says Mr Sathyanarayana, adding, “In contrast, the healthcare market in India, though robust, lacks both standardisation and a centralised system. This, however, is changing as hospitals understand the benefits of standardisation for business process optimisation.”
Employing analytics. Not just digital transformation and standardisation, TEngage’s analytics tool can help healthcare providers chart a more robust healthcare plan, service line planning and track the ROI.
Business partners
Tata Elxsi is the digital transformation partner to several hospitals in India, among them are Kaveri Hospitals and Trustwell Hospital. “These hospitals see us as a partner who can guide them through the entire digital transformation process, giving them insights on future healthcare technologies and trends,” says Mr Sathyanarayana, adding, “Having India as a target market fulfils our need to showcase how the TEngage solution can be scaled and vetted in a high-demand, high-usage market, where patient retention is important.”
Healthcare providers have realised the significance of value-based care and the positive customer experience in managing customer loyalty. As the pandemic heightened the possibility of creating long-term patient loyalty via online offerings, several hospitals have started creating strategic patient-retention plans by offering continued service via reminders and other packages for the benefit of their patients. TEngage offers plans that allow hospitals to continue engaging with their patients for all their healthcare needs, albeit via the app.
Telemedicine or remote healthcare allows hospitals to offer doctor consultations across states and cities to a larger database of patients. With TEngage, a hospital in Bengaluru with a branch in Mumbai can tap into the expertise of doctors on their panel in the Mumbai hospital for a specific case. Through its customisable interface, hospitals can add details such as view state/branch-wise doctors, add doctors, remove doctors, scale up a service, and more for the hospitals to avail services of a specialist in the remote-care mode.
“TEngage’s omnichannel solution enhances the hospital’s utilisation, improves patient outcomes and even offers business analytics specific to the hospital and its patient pattern,” opines Mr Sathyanarayana whose team is now looking at integrating and customising TEngage for the therapeutics segment in order to cater to the evolving demands of the healthcare ecosystem.
—Sanghamitra Bhowmik
