I visited India last month and learned a great deal about what happens when a country embraces open source as a matter of government and economic development policy.  From drug discovery to open innovation to healthcare and education, open source is being used and applied in innovative ways in India.

On my last day there, I visited a government hospital in Chennai (or Madras as it was formerly known).  It was a Saturday and the queue for services was long but not nearly as long as it used to be.   The best way I can describe the method of care was McDonald's (and I don't meant that as derogatory).  Patients stand in line and when they get to the doctor, they describe theur ailments and the doctor prescribes medications.  The patient then goes to the pharmacy at the hospital and picks up their medication.  Very efficient because it has to be; they see thousands of paients every day.  Of course, they have hospital beds and separate care faciilities for more serious problems.  The government hospitals are the primary care providers for a high percentage of the Indian population. 

What's new is the application of information technology to the patient record management process.  It was literally 'all paper' until just a few months ago.  You can see in the pictures I took the computer terminals being used by the doctors.  The benefits to the patients are that their average wait in line has decreased significantly.  I heard that a full day could be required in the past to see the doctor.  Now it's down to few hours at most.  Another benefit is better inventory control of the medications and less shrinkage of that inventory.  Finally, there are better healthcare productivity metrics possible, not to mention improvements in quality of service by having better information on hand at the point of diagnosis.

Myself, I had to get a physical this week as well as a stress test.  I had to go on two separate days because of insurance policy.  All of the records are kept in paper files that the doctors scan through.  Granted, I only waited a few minutes and the visit lasted for 30 minutes each time but I couldn't help to wonder if the patients in these Indian hospitals might not be receiving better care because their doctors have access to better information than my own.

This is the motivation for improved information management of health records in the U.S.  It's part of the new economic stimulus package.  With these systems we can lower costs, improve quality of care and lessen the amount of time we spend as patients in filling out forms and negotiating payment processing.

Next up, I'll talk about a cool thing I discovered one our employees in India is helping to drive: The Open Source Model as applied to the drug discovery process.