Patient history: Healthcare on cloud nine

NetApp, a fast-growing cloud-led, data-centric software company, has been selected by Narayana Health to modernise its IT systems and satisfy the new demands of healthcare management. NetApp will help Narayana Health to optimise storage and data management efficiencies across locations, thereby helping advance medical care in India. With this collaboration, Narayana Health unveiled Athma—a homegrown records management system that allows the company to manage its data securely and efficiently while taking advantage of NetApp solutions.

As one of the largest hospital groups in the country, Narayana Health treats over 2.6 million patients every year, making data critical to its operations. Providing rapid access to patient records to facilitate faster diagnosis and shorter response times was a huge challenge. Because a reliable and responsive IT infrastructure was crucial to achieving this objective, Narayana Health deployed NetApp technology solutions to store and process patient records and images. The resulting system, Athma, captures, stores, and retrieves networks across 15 sites. The system enables medical staff and patients to access their entire medical history in a few seconds—further enhancing the quality of healthcare services provided by Narayana.

Ramu Manjunath, core infrastructure head, Narayana Health, said, “NetApp comes with a unique approach to data management. Storing data on NetApp is much faster compared to the other solution providers. It offered simple and easy infrastructure management solutions to our engineers. The whole shift to NetApp was fairly simple and seamless from implementation, architectural, and support standpoints.” He added: “With Athma, patients have the complete continuity of their entire medical history. Their history is available in our system and can be pulled in a few seconds, so the doctors can review and take a call rather than going back and forth finding records or reinvesting in investigations.”

The Narayana Health hospital system plans to increase the number of locations and add more clinical services to its 60-plus specialties. NetApp technology will help here. Cloud Volumes ONTAP will provide the ability to manage optimisation, and tools such as the NetApp Active IQ Digital Advisor will help the hospital system manage and optimise costs.