Though healthcare is as old as the Stone Age, it is only recently that it started adopting technologies for better performance and service. Though the sector is quite late in inheriting technology compared to other industries, India still lags far behind many other countries in this race. Several hospitals do not have a proper workflow process or a set of guidelines for hospital management system and even the norms for the industry are not stringent like other industries.Finding this huge gap in the Indian healthcare industry, Aosta, Inc. put its footprint in India in 2004 as Aosta Software Technologies to provide solutions specifically meant for the healthcare industry.

Started as a closely held public limited company, Aosta is centered in Coimbatore and is engaged in providing various services for Hospital Management System (HMS). In a journey close to 10 years, the company has done close to 95 HMS implementations in India for all sizes of hospitals. Aosta's application is developed on ASP.NET with Microsoft SQL as a backend which makes it a strong platform where all the functionalities of the hospital modules are present.

Just as Aosta Valley is known as the Heart of the Alps, Aosta Software is the heart of the HMS for those hospitals that use it. One just needs to implement this common platform generated with the build-in workflow and follow the standard workflow practices that most of the administrators have accepted in India.

"Our solution provides a standardized workflow that eliminates interpersonal conflict inside the hospital where everything is in a workflow oriented approach and the system drives the entire workflow," explains Ravi Shankar, Director - Technical Operations, Aosta Software. The solution helps the hospital eradicate paper work as well. For instance, the request from doctor's office can be electronically punched into the computer system which will be available into the hospital's service desk. Laboratory Equipments are interfaced bi-directionally reducing manual intervention. These reports are electronically approved by the concerned department's heads. Doctors get alerts on their mobile phones when the patients results are abnormal thereby enabling to plan the course of action as soon as possible. Even the request for wheel chairs and stretcher for transporting patients from Ward Stations and Doctors office to service departments is made on the computer system thereby avoiding conflicts.

Based on the requirements of the clients, Aosta picks the best fit module for them. Additional modules can also be chosen as per their requirement. To do this, Aosta considers the feedback of the champions from each department of the hospital who has a clear mandate of their department's workflow in-line with the vision of the top management. The process is reviewed, simplified and then consolidated as a systemrequirement specification's document which is then compared with the application that has been presented to the hospital. Aosta has also introduced smartcard in the hospitals wherein patients can pay or deposit through this card thus reducing patients' footprint in the billing counter making the workflow more organized and systematic.