Dr Lal PathLabs is the largest diagnostic service provider inIndia. Dr Lal PathLabs offers the widest test menu and has a panIndiapresence in all important cities and towns ofIndia, in the form of laboratories and patient service centers. Its employee strength of over 1500 people, serves over 10 million customers every year.
Dr Lal PathLabs is planning 150 laboratories by 2013. It is looking at strategic alliances with / acquisition of existing players. The company considers IT as a strong thrust area.
Munender Soperna, head IT at Dr Lal PathLabs, talks about technology adoption in the diagnostic and healthcare industry.
What are the new technologies that you are planning to implement?
We are working on Intranet portal and projects on mobility including apps and hardware.
What is your IT budget?
As part of our IT policy, we cannot share our budget. We have revenue of Rs 10 crore and capital of Rs 8 crore.
What are the major technological challenges and technology adoption in the diagnostic and healthcare industry?
The main challenge is that the market is highly fragmented with Pathological Labs offering basic to advance testing facilities for patients. InIndia, lab accreditation is not mandatory.
The size of operations varies from very small labs to large multi-city super specialty labs. At present, there is lack of domain expertise in IT solution consulting space.
What is your opinion about the need for 4G among Indian enterprises?
Technology and communication media is always an enabler in any type of industry but usage is depending upon industry because CIOs are also responsible for ROI of the project. Every industry/system/process/human being requires speed. Speed is a backbone of any application. Apart from this 4G feature should be present all acrossIndia.
We have 10 Cr. Of revenue and 8 Cr. Is the Capital budget with a incremental factor of 30 percent per annum.What is your ICT budget? What is the growth in ICT budget? What are the new components?
What are your opinion about cloud and importance of cloud?
Though we are in diagnostic business and accredited with some International certificate, we are not much interested in Cloud as a concept.
How do you handle IT risks?
Healthcare/diagnostics industry requires in depth knowledge of IT as well as Lab/Clinical processes and combination of these types of knowledge base (IT and Lab Processes) is very limited.
Lab processes are not matured and streamlined across the industry, while policy guidelines are still awaited. Each and every lab is working on their own processes.
For us, security and patient data protection is the top priority.
What would you expect from the communications industry?
Bandwidth is the backbone of our industry. We are planning to expand in order to spread our reach to upcoming or Tier-2/3 cities. To match with growth plan, we require the geo-presence of communication industry without compromising on quality of product or services at these locations.
Who are your main vendors and what are their contributions?
We have a heterogeneous environment. Our main business partners include IBM, Dell and Microsoft.
