India’s largest healthcare organization economically improves service to millions with 31,000 virtual desktops

The Employee State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) is chartered by the Indian government to deliver insurance and healthcare benefits to over 20 million private- and public-sector employees. ESIC provides these services through over 2,000 facilities that include hospitals, dispensaries, and branch offices across India. ESIC’s IT systems were outdated and could not provide high-quality service to its stakeholders.

A massive undertaking requires a new approach

ESIC recognized that improving service delivery would require a robust IT system that entailed:

• Computerizing 144 hospitals, 620 insurance branches, 1388 dispensaries/clinics, and 51 regional offices
• Issuing 20 million medical ID smartcards
• Creating of one of the largest medical records databases in the world • Providing online patient medical records to doctors and nurses
• Building a database of 50 million fingerprints
• Rolling out a single enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to automate ESIC processes
• Reducing claims processing times for beneficiaries
• Simplifying enrollment and premium payment for employers

ESIC turned to leading IT provider Wipro to develop and manage a fully networked, cloud-based IT system that would cost-efficiently leapfrog existing technologies and dramatically improve service delivery.

ESIC chooses NComputing virtual desktops Wipro designed a private cloud infrastructure that included a centralized data center and 31,000 NComputing virtual desktops. The datacenter was built at ESIC’s New Delhi headquarters to host the massive medical and insurance ERP applications and databases. In order to provide access for the 2,200 branch facilities to the datacenter, ESIC and Wipro chose low-cost NComputing virtual desktops. The virtual desktops are locally linked to Wipro host PCs, which then connect through a Cisco-based network back to the datacenter. In addition to the lower purchase cost, the NComputing devices use 90% less electricity than PCs. Security is a important concern when working with personal data like health and insurance records. NComputing devices store no data locally, so theft or loss of a device presents no security risk. Some NComputing devices have no USB ports, so copying data to a USB storage device is physically impossible, further enhancing security. Minimizing the crippling costs of obsolescence in a typical PC environment is easy with NComputing—instead of having to purchase all new PCs for all users every 2-3 years, ESIC can now simply upgrade the much less expensive NComputing devices every 2-3 years, then replace the many fewer shared PCs during every 4-6 years.

Dramatic improvements in medical care and morale

The NComputing virtual desktops have dramatically improved medical care by providing online access to patient records, minimizing prescription errors, and speeding insurance reimbursements. Employee morale at the facilities has improved because the doctors and nurses have the latest data at their fingertips and can focus on providing medical care rather than filling out countless forms and charts. ESIC has enjoyed significant productivity improvements with the NComputing virtual desktop system and cloud computing infrastructure.