Dell serves up ‘hospital IT in a box’ for India

Dell Services has launched its first cloud-based hospital information system (HIS) solution for the mid-market segment in the Indian healthcare sector.

It is the first offering for the pure-play Indian market from Dell’s Healthcare and Life Sciences division, which is the company’s fastest growing and tallest vertical in services. Until now, Dell’s healthcare services here have been limited to providing IT outsourcing service delivery and offshore support, and in the case of a few major players, playing a consultant role.

In an interaction with this correspondent , Sid Nair, vice president and global general manager, Healthcare and Life Sciences at Dell Services, said that the company believes the Indian healthcare sector, growing at about 15 per cent, is a vast and untapped resource, the mid-market segment in particular. Dell defines the mid-market segment as any hospital that has about 100 beds, and this includes medium-size hospitals that are part of hospital chains.

Veera S. Raghavan, executive director, practices and solutions group at Dell’s healthcare services, calls it ‘hospital IT in a box’, offers on a ‘pay per use’ model with nil capital investments as a big incentive for healthcare providers in the mid-market segment.

“We’re focussed on the mid-market and are not going after the big players with this one. But it is of course easily scalable. The market doesn’t have something like this, and what is there is largely outdated. Currently, there are lot of boutique vendors, but there is no standardisation,” said Mr. Raghavan. For this, Dell is collaborating with Ubq Technologies (which provides the Hospital Information Systems solution in the front-end) and Ramco Systems for the ERP on the cloud.

Dell plans to leverage its PC sales team to reach out to the existing market. Mr. Nair pointed out that Dell’s primary challenge is in being able to scale this business up and make it profitable, for which the company has a three-year road map. Though no details were shared on pricing, Dell said that the ‘software as a service’ model is attractive and priced competitively. The company also claims that it is filling a gap in the segment by offering a product that’s strong not only on the clinical side but also in terms of financial management systems. “Today, hospitals are adding chains or branches on a monthly basis. The segment is growing and they need a fast growing IT to go along. They need a structured financial structure, which most competitors don’t provide – they’ve got the clinical side of it, but what we’re offering on the financial management side is much more unique. It’s also entirely scalable, and in no time,” said Mr. Raghavan.