The Bengaluru based health services provider Nova Medical Centre is in talks with Tata Communications for more advanced capabilities on its hosted call centres such as skills based routing and patch in service for doctors.

It also plans to add a common document management system to work effectively with path labs across the country.

In an interview with Pharmabiz, Harinath Chakravarthy, Group CIO, Nova Medical Centre said that Nova needed a data centre connected 24x7 to all 20 locations with the end objective of provisioning mission critical applications. Nova set up its data centre (DC) in Bengaluru. On our service provider’s advice, we invested heavily in a robust IT infrastructure with 26 servers to help us scale up the operations and future growth.

Nova selected Tata Communications as an advisory partner because of its track record, its global data centres, on-demand managed services and connectivity solutions with the aim to meet specific needs of doctors, nursing staff, patients, third-party insurance companies, diagnostic laboratories among others. It wanted a single platform that is scalable, reliable and secure. Also, it must be able to add new clinics quickly across the country.

Tata Communications has the potential to offer a commercial model that aligns closely with Nova’s requirements, through stringent SLA, dedicated infrastructure for back up and storage, multi platform support, and 24x7 application availability.

Tata Communications virtualized Nova’s multiple critical clinical applications on the private cloud. These are then delivered securely to users, not only in Nova clinics but also to those outside, for example, doctors based in other locations, insurance companies accessing the patients’ records, or diagnostic labs uploading reports or images.

Nova gains from high computing capacity that can support growth of additional locations and organic growth over the next 18 months. Simultaneously, the network can self-adjust to sudden surges in patients at any location and scales seamlessly without interruption. It manages hot upgrades, re-routing etc. without any outage. “Nova manages 600,000 transactions per month, as compared to the earlier on-premise set-up for 15 locations managing 300,000 transactions per month, with a growth of 10-15 per cent per month,” explains Chakravarthy.

It will offer clinical applications exchange information in real time, irrespective of patient’s touch point at front office or laboratory or pharmacy etc. Besides, the online booking platform, toll free calls to the contact centre, and website translate to queries. The open, flexible platform can add new applications and features. Alerts are initiated via text messages and emails if there is a breakdown. Tata Communications rectifies these without disrupting work at the clinics.

Chakravarthy adds, “The investments are high but this makes our services agile, for example discharge or billing, takes less than 30 minutes. This brings us quicker returns on investment by allowing us to grow quickly at our existing clinics and by adding a new location every month. Tata Communications Managed Security Services ensure regulatory compliance while improving overall security with intrusion detection and prevention at its ISO 27001 certified data centre.”

Nova Medical Centers, an innovative health services provider, develops and manages day surgical centres primarily in India. Founded in 2009, headquartered in Bengaluru, it partners with over 600 surgeons in India and the Middle East across 12 specialty surgery centres and six in-vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics.