Indian hospitals ranked for Digital media use

The Cybermetrics Lab recently published their world ranking of hospitals, taking into account the institutional activities in field of e-knowledge and their use of digital media for communications

Supporting Open Access initiatives, electronic access to scientific publications and to other academic material are our primary targets…The Web covers not only only formal (e-journals, repositories) but also informal scholarly communication.

The Web indicators measure electronic contents, especially those used for scholarly communication, but also basic information about the hospital, its organization, services and personnel. The rank takes into account both the volume of information published and the impact or visibility of such contents measured by the number of external links the web pages receive from others. As expected, about 45 % of top 200 and 38% of top 1000 hospitals are situated in North America.

The Laparoscopy hospital at N.Delhi is the only Indian hospital to figure in the top 100 hospitals from Asia ( 47/100, Asia), and also the only Indian hospital in top 500 worldwide. Amongst the others, Sir Gangaram hospital scores much better than Apollo and Tata Memorial.

L.R.S Institute of Tuberculosis and respiratory diseases records a very enviable world rank of 19, in number of papers and citations visible on Google Scholar., a noteworthy list headed by The Institute of Cancer Research, London.

Below is the list of 9 hospitals from India amongst the first 2000 worldwide , and their world rankings ( as per Cybermetrics Lab).Individual Ranking in various categories for India

India         WORLD RANK	HOSPITAL
(1)                 279	laparoscopy Hospital		406	749	599	140
(2)                624	Sir Ganga Ram Hospital		2,351	788	1,834	225
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————
(3)                632	Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences & Research Centre		1,015	1,429	1,174	179
(4)                921	Aravind Eye Care System		1,567	2,717	766	146
(5)                1178	Sankara Nethralaya Hospital		2,690	984	1,224	2,200
(6)                1349	L.R.S. Institute of Tuberculosis & Respiratory Diseases		2,845	6,679	1,070	19
(7)                1407	Apollo Hospitals		3,045	938	3,453	2,200
(8)                1819	Tata Memorial Centre		2,459	3,469	322	1,497
(9)                1885	Sri Ramachandra University & Medical Centre		1,742	3,787	1,660	426

India needs IT based health delivery system

New Delhi: The National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) International Advisory Panel Chairperson Jeffrey Sachs has called upon India to implement IT based health delivery system in the country.

The Columbia University Professor, while praising India’s effort for closing gap on the health mission under the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) with the other countries, however, said that the country needs to make more investment in the sector. “India should step up the budgetary allocation in health sector to four to five per cent of the GDP,” Sachs said adding that a higher investment in the health sector will give great social returns.

Calling the NRHM as one of the most remarkable achievements in public health sector, he said that India’s dramatic improvement in the health sector have been made possible due to enhanced partnership between the centre, state and local units.

Sachs, who is also the advisor to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, said that the increase in institutional delivery and drop in mortality is especially impressive.

Arguing for an IT-based health delivery system, Sachs added that India can serve as a role model for other countries in the health sector.Having travelled to a few Indian states, he also said that there is, however, a need for more human resources and logistical support.

He was speaking with the media after a meeting with the Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Anbumani Ramadoss and the senior officials of the Ministry for the fifth meeting of the Panel in New Delhi on Tuesday. The advisory panel meeting was also attended by Health Ministers of three African countries— Kenyan Minister for Medical Services Peter Anyag ‘Nyong’ O, Malawi Minister of Health Khumbo Kachali, and Rawanda’s Minister of Health Rechard Sezibera

-A Fantastic Medical Informatics conference in India

Just back from the Meditel 2008, the fifth International conference on Medical informatics and Telemedicine. The theme of the conference this year was “ICT for Medical Education and Research” and there were some pretty sharp presentations in Medical e.learning. Hopefully, as promised, most of the presentations would be available on the MCSI website soon.

The few presentations i thoroughly enjoyed included,

• E-Learning- Current trends in India- by Dr.Balasubramanyam, Prof. ans head, Dept. of Anatomy, SJMC, Bangalore.

• Cochrane Collaboration- Informed healthcare in South Asia- Dr.Pratap Tharyan

• Improving Healthcare via Transparent monitoring- Mr.Bill Thies, MIT and Microsoft ( use of microchip within pill boxes to monitor compliance in National health programs like DOTS India.)

• World”s first prepaid service for Doctors consultation from any Phone- by Mr.Sunil Kulkarni, Group President, Oxigen Services (India) Pvt. Ltd.( a beautiful concept to allow pre-paying for telephonic medical consultations)

There were a number of other interesting ones, like this Virtual conference using Webex services, via a lowly Tata Indicom plug2surf device !!

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