Tata Medical Center (TMC) is a philanthropic cancer-care center in Kolkata with state-of-the-art facilities to cater to the people of East and North-East India and neighbouring countries. Governed by a charitable trust—Tata Medical Center Trust—TMC started operations in May 2011 with a mandate to offer affordable cancer treatment to all sections of society and to focus on study, research and training in Oncology

A dream project of Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons & Tata Group, the hospital offers integrated Oncology facilities with well-trained professionals, modern facilities and equipment. The hospital has a capacity of 437 beds and 75% of the infrastructure is earmarked for subsidized treatment of underprivileged sections. It provides a wide spectrum of services from diagnosis and therapy to rehabilitation and palliative support.

TMC Kolkata follows a comprehensive approach to treatment where a team of multi-disciplinary experts diagnose and treat patients. Experts from different streams, such as Surgical Oncology, Radiation Oncology, Medical Oncology, Pathology, Radiology, and other clinical and support groups participate in decision-making for treatment protocols using evidence-based medicine strategies and documented clinical guidelines.

“As an organization, our top three focus areas are patient, patient and patient. The STT GDC India partnership has enabled us to leave the management of data centre to experts and forget about it, so we are able to focus on patient care”

Arnab Neogy, IT Head, TMC Kolkata

Says Arnab Neogy, Head - IT at TMC Kolkata, “TMC Kolkata’s mission is to provide best-in-class cancer care by leveraging a collaborative model in which doctors access reports and take opinions of specialists in realtime while making decisions for treatment.”

Customer Challenge

TMC Kolkata has the finest specialists and has become a leading cancer care facility in the country attracting patients from the entire Eastern region as well as from neighbouring countries. Patient load is very high and the hospital’s endeavour is to serve as many patients as possible by leveraging technology.

Given the criticality of the disease and the patient load, speed and efficiency is of essence where teams of doctors can collaborate and make fast decisions to deliver the best care while achieving high patient turnover

The hospital has highly digitized systems and processes to ensure seamless flow of information through the entire patient journey. From registration, OPD, laboratory, radiology, to OT and billing, the workflow is connected and information is easily available.

Applications such as Hospital Management System (HMS); email; telephony; ERP and Picture Archiving and Communication (PAC) system form the backbone of its operations and require high availability and even momentary downtime can lead to serious consequences. For example, sometimes surgeons need to consult colleagues during complex cases and access PAC to extract reports and images even while the operation is going on.

The sensitivity of hospital operations require real-time back up at a secondary site which is always available and TMC Kolkata was looking for a partner that could provide solid data centre facilities to replicate data continuously and switch over automatically during downtime.

However, building and managing another data centre for its Disaster Recovery strategy was not feasible, given the challenges associated with acquiring physical properties, ensuring uninterrupted power supply and appropriate cooling to run a data centre. Therefore, TMC Kolkata partnered with STT GDC India to fulfil its requirements for DR location in Kolkata, so it can focus on other critical activities.

STT GDC India Solution

TMC Kolkata uses STT GDC India colocation facilities in Kolkata wherein STT GDC India provides best-inclass infrastructure provisioning along with necessary power and cooling to run the data centre, allowing the hospital to focus on patient care and service delivery. A partnership that began in 2013 has thrived over the years, enabling TMC Kolkata to focus on its core focus of delivering care and service in one of the most challenging fields in healthcare.

Says TMC Kolkata IT Head, Arnab Neogy, “As an organization, our top three focus areas are patient, patient and patient. The STT GDC India partnership has enabled us to leave the management of data centre to experts and forget about it, so we are able to focus on patient care.”

More importantly, the five layers of physical security validated by global standards’ bodies at STT GDC India data centres have adequately addressed TMC Kolkata’s concerns around privacy issues of patient health records. From the perimeter right up to the shelf where servers are hosted, these layers include a combination of physical and automated checks and control at the perimeter; facility; floor; quadrant and at the cabinet level in tandem with industry best practices.

Customer Benefits

TMC Kolkata has enormously benefitted from this partnership as it enables the hospital to achieve several strategic objectives. Specifically, following benefits have accrued to TMC Kolkata:

• Helped the hospital to focus on its core objective of delivering patient care and service to cancer patients
• As a healthcare service provider, TMC Kolkata has stringent compliance requirements related to data privacy, which STT GDC India has helped meet with multiple layers of physical data centre security.
• As a non-profit organization, demonstrating conscientious sustainability practices help attract funds and partnering with STT GDC India has enabled it to showcase its commitments as the data centres run on 30% renewable energy.