Sun Microsystems, Inc. has chalked out plans to bring its technological know-how to India in network computing along with its domain expertise of its healthcare partners to deliver quality solutions.
Without disclosing the specific plans in India, Jeremy Lim, director-healthcare, South Asia, Sun Microsystems said in an email interview with this correspondent, "The trends in the Indian healthcare market echoes the evolution that we have seen in other developing countries where there is an increasing pressures on the healthcare system with a shortage both skilled manpower and infrastructure to meet the demands. The situation fits well with Sun's capabilities and vision as an IT-enabler and we believe the Indian market will be an important one for Sun healthcare in the years ahead."
Sun has been in the healthcare industry for more than a decade. The healthcare industry is largely non-cyclical and is an important pillar to drive Sun's growth. "We actually grew up in the medical imaging space, with OEM technology partnerships with imaging equipment suppliers such as GE Medical, Agfa Medical and Siemens Medical," he said.
Sun offers healthcare sector the most widely used UNIX-based platform that is matured, scalable and open as well as the widest breath of price points to suit a variety of implementation requirements. Its R&D investment in network computing and active participation in international standards bodies like HL7, ebXML), helped to make the healthcare delivery chain a reality, he informed. "We have global experience in implementing volume transactions and the healthcare industry in particular is one of the most heavily transactional sectors that need technical privacy and security requirements."
Sun's Orion stack of software solutions that enables healthcare providers to change over from legacy, costly and customized deployments to an architecture-based shared network service which is accessible by clinicians, administrators and patients according to their roles and permissions.
Much of Sun's impact in healthcare has also been in heavy-computing and high-end visualization systems because these are natural areas where healthcare providers and vendors would chose Sun servers and software to scale up data-intensive processes and procedures, or for mission-critical systems where uptime is important.
Many hospitals also use Sun for point solutions like HR & ERP and it is not uncommon to have at least some Sun presence in a hospital, he stated.
However, with many healthcare providers e-enabling their operations, Sun sees the potential for a larger and more visible role in healthcare, as it has demonstrated in other industries such as finance and telecommunications.
The competition for Sun is not unique to the healthcare industry but reflects similar competitive landscape in other sectors, he informed. Some of the major healthcare projects of the company include mainframe rehosting, to built the scalable, web enabled solutions with Sun technologies for the Atlantic Blue Cross Care and similar efforts for the Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Sun and Mercator enabled real-time data to help Group Health Cooperative meet its HIPPA requirements.
Another notable assignment by Sun was in the area of medical imaging and visualization technology, where it selected Columbia University's Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Centre as a Sun Centre of Excellence in Neuroscience Research.
The new centre opened in March 2003 is using Sun technologies to create a central link between neuro-computing and neuro-imaging which is within the reach of neuroscientists globally because the potential of brain function will depend upon new computing tools like neuro-imaging, behaviour, physiology, electro physiology, genetics, pharmacology, and nanotechnology. "We are in the process of consolidating similar projects in the Asia-Pacific region," said Jeremy Lim.