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The perception about IT in hospitals is undergoing a paradigm shift. Earlier, much of the IT deployment was focused on improving the billing and patient registration procedures. Now with differential service levels and facilities being made available to patients by various hospitals, IT is seen to be the key link that has the potential to integrate the entire healthcare system and improve processes, efficiency and overall experience of patient care cycle.

This dependency of the healthcare sector on IT has turned into a lucrative business opportunity for the IT companies. Globally, the IT expenditure in the healthcare sector is estimated at about $75 billion. Significant investments in hospital management information system (HMIS) are in the pipeline.

In India too, it is poised to grow to $30 billion by 2010, informs Rajendra Ranganathan, head of provider practices at Wipro Technologies.

HMIS is primarily a workflow solution that helps a hospital to assimilate and aggregate information related to patient’s care cycle across various departments and decision makers to cut down waiting times and errors in reporting. From hospitals’ perspective, they can utilise their critical resources at a higher level. No wonder, HMIS will be in the growth phase for the next 10-12 years, says Ajay Sharma, CEO and co-founder of Srishti Software.

If trends emanating from the healthcare sector are an indication, there is a huge shortage of bed capacity in the country. This is expected to spur the growth of several hospitals to meet the demand. If one were to look at the private healthcare IT spending, it is worth mentioning that a good number of hospitals in India are embarking on their tech journey with their first round of computerisation. In short, they consider computerisation of the hospital set up as part of the essential infrastructure. Needless to say, this means more IT spending from government-owned as well as private hospitals.

In addition, healthcare tourism in the country is poised to grow from the present level of $300 million to $2.2 billion by 2012. This would call for higher bed capacity, ultra-modern care centres and availability of patient data remotely. Hence, all these parameters call for a strong impetus towards the deployment of advanced IT solutions in the hospital premises.

Even now, some of the hospitals have seen a significant uptake in their efficiency levels by computerising at various levels—maintaining the patient’s history, building IT infrastructure, HR solutions, administrative tasks, ICU, operation theatres and various other tasks like X-ray, sonography, ultrasound, etc. KR Sundaam, CIO, KG Hospital says, “We are focusing on the front office—registration, billing, labs, insurance, dietary and pharmacy. Business operations of the hospitals are more dependent on the IT. We are now getting into the clinical systems especially the PACS (picture archiving and communication system).” Globally, the market for HMIS including PACS is estimated around $11 billion.

Typically, a hospital’s main requirements with IT begin with revving up the administrative tasks. These are followed by clinical functions like ICU and dieticians. Then comes the task of deploying IT solutions for revenue management like finance, investment, etc. Nevertheless, the deployment of an integrated hospital management system is a prerequisite to improve the overall efficiency, says Vamsi Chandra Kasivajjala, executive-director (healthcare), Sobha Renaissance Information Technology (SRIT).

An increasing number of hospitals are also loosening their purses to spend on clinical support system. The idea is to capture significant clinical outsourcing work that is coming to Indian shores by way of various pharmaceutical majors.

Analysts inform that even today, some of the major hospitals across India have islands of information that cannot be interconnected, resulting in manual transportation of data, thereby diluting efficacy of automation. It will be another 5-7 years before Indian healthcare sector starts seeing hospitals that are well equipped and well connected in terms of accessibility and availability of information on demand.

At present, there is an equivocal demand for solutions to computerise the clinical operations of the hospital. In the next four to five years, there will be a robust demand for ERP systems and IT solutions for inventories, procurement and electronic medical records, informs Kasivajjala. In a nutshell, healthcare is one of the fastest growing industries in India with heavy investments.

Going forward, the patient delivery system and enhancement of the patient care system, good hospital management information system, lab integration, business and clinical optimisation are some areas which are poised to grow rapidly.

Egypt’s antiquities council says that archaeologists have unearthed a 3,000-year-old red granite head believed to portray the 19th Dynasty pharaoh Ramses II.

The Supreme Council of Antiquities says the discovery was made recently at Tell Basta, about 50 miles northeast of Cairo.

The council’s statement Thursday says the 30-inch high head belonged to a colossal statue of Ramses II that once stood in the area. Its nose is broken and the beard that was once attached to the king’s chin is missing.

The site at Tell Basta was dedicated to the cat-goddess Bastet and was an important center from the Old Kingdom until the end of the Roman Period. Archeologists are still digging on the location for the rest of the statue.

India will host the next Live Earth concert to raise funds for lighting homes with solar energy in places where people do not have access to electricity, organisers said.

The December event will see U.S. rocker Jon Bon Jovi and Bollywood’s biggest superstar, Amitabh Bachchan share the stage, and is described by organisers as one of the biggest events held in India.

The concert will be held in India’s financial capital Mumbai on Dec. 7, Live Earth founder Kevin Wall said in Mumbai.

“(Former U.S. Vice President) Al Gore asked me whether we could do this in India, and I said yes,” Wall told Reuters in Mumbai. “This is going to be huge.”

“Jon Bon Jovi is just one name and Mr Bachchan is just one name, but there will be a lot of international artists,” he said.

Wall, who organised a series of concerts last year with the former U.S. vice-president, said the event in India would be telecast live in more than 100 countries.

Gore, who spoke via satellite this week during a news conference held in Mumbai on Thursday said India could provide the leadership required to bring about changes in world policies on climate change.

The proceeds from the concert will go to the “Light A Billion Lives campaign,” supported by Nobel Prize-winner Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the United Nation’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

At least 1.6 billion people worldwide do not have access to electricity, Pachauri said, adding that the campaign would target villages in countries like India, Myanmar, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Malawi.

Organisers said they would set up giant screens and distribute televisions in remote villagers for the concert.

Hundreds of new marine species have been found on Australia’s coral reefs, surprising an international team of biologists who announced details of their findings here Thursday.

The three expeditions to Lezard and Heron islands, and Ningaloo Reef, included a first systematic scientific inventory of spectacular soft corals, named octocorals for the eight tentacles around each polyp.

Researchers located some 300 soft coral species, half of which are believed new to science; dozens of small crustacean species; and an unusual amphipod of the Maxillipiidae family. It has a whip-like back leg almost three times the size of its body.

Also found were “new species of tanaid crustaceans, shrimp-like animals, some with claws longer than their bodies; and a beautiful, rare Cassiopeia jellyfish.”

Between 40 and 60 percent of the tiny amphipod crustaceans listed, the “insect of the marine world,” will be formally described for the first time, researchers said.

“We were all surprised and excited to find such a large variety of marine life never before described ‘most notably soft coral, isopods, tanaid crustaceans and worms’ and in waters that divers access easily and regularly,” said Julian Caley, Principal Research Scientist at AIMS and co-leader of CoML’s CReefs project.

“Corals face threats ranging from ocean acidification, pollution, and warming to overfishing and starfish outbreaks,” says Dr. Ian Poiner, Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), which led the research.

“Only by establishing a baseline of biodiversity and following through with later censuses can people know the impact of those threats and find clues to mitigate them,” he argued, so expeditions to the three sites will be repeated for the next three years to follow the species and monitor climate change and other factors.

Other major finds included potentially new polychaetes, marine animals known as “bristle worms,” a relative of leeches and earth worms. As many as two-thirds of species found at Lizard Island alone were believed new to science.

The launch pad delivery of a container filled with new equipment bound for the Hubble Space Telescope next month has been delayed by at least a day due to loose insulation, space agency officials said Wednesday.

NASA workers were set to move Hubble’s delicate replacement parts to Launch Pad 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center on Thursday to be installed aboard the space shuttle Atlantis for a planned Oct. 10 launch, but will now have to clean up bits of insulation before making the move, said Allard Beutel, a NASA spokesperson at the center there in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

The insulation came loose while shuttle technicians were installing a plastic-wrapped cargo carrier containing some of Hubble’s replacement batteries and the new Wide Field Camera 3 into a container for the short trip to the launch pad.

“We basically have some insulation particles floating around inside the protective bagging,” Beutel told SPACE.com, adding that technicians now have to open the bag and clean up any contamination before proceeding. “So right now we’re probably looking at probably a 24-hour delay to going out to the launch pad with the payload.”

NASA is still targeting an Oct. 10 launch for Atlantis’ STS-125 mission to Hubble while engineers assess how much time the clean up work might require. Commanded by veteran spaceflyer Scott Altman, Atlantis astronauts plan to stage five back-to-back spacewalks to install new instruments, batteries, gyroscopes, as well as make unprecedented repairs and add a docking berth to Hubble. The mission, NASA’s fifth and final planned Hubble overhaul, is expected to run about 11 days and extend the telescope’s orbital life through 2013.

Beutel said NASA engineers are optimistic that the insulation clean up job will be quick, and mission managers have not yet indicated any plans to delay Atlantis’ launch date.

“They’ll adjust it if they have to, but at the moment there’s no need to,” Beutel said, adding that Atlantis’ payload could be delivered to the seaside launch pad by late Friday if all goes well.

Meanwhile, NASA officials are also working to clean up the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston after Hurricane Ike battered that center with rain and caused minor damage last week. Space agency officials have said the repair work should not have an impact on Atlantis’ planned launch, though it did delay the arrival of an unmanned Russian cargo ship at the International Space Station by several days.

NASA is also preparing to roll a second space shuttle, Atlantis’ sister ship Endeavour, to Launch Pad 39A early Thursday, marking the first time since 2001 that two orbiters were in launch position.

Endeavour is being prepared for a planned November mission to the space station, but must first serve as a rescue ship for the Hubble shuttle flight. Because they must fly to a higher orbit and in a different inclination than the space station to reach Hubble, Atlantis astronauts will not be able to reach the safe haven of the orbiting laboratory if their shuttle suffers critical damage.

Instead, NASA will ready Endeavour and a small, four-astronaut crew for the unlikely event a rescue is required. Upon Atlantis’ safe return home, Endeavour is due to move to Launch Pad 39B for a planned Nov. 12 liftoff, NASA officials have said.

US authorities raced Monday to help millions of people stranded without water and power in the wake of devastating Hurricane Ike, which left more than 17 dead across nine states.

Massive search and recovery operations were underway in storm-battered Texas, where officials said 10 people were killed and thousands rescued by boat and helicopter after Ike slammed into the southern state on Saturday.

“We’re working with FEMA to get people food and water, cleaning up debris off the streets, facilitating (local energy company) Centerpoint’s efforts to get power restored and just trying to help businesses get up and running,” said Joe Laud, of the Houston emergency center.

The death toll across the region was likely to rise as the recovery effort continued, local authorities warned, as four people were reported to have died in the Midwest, along with one person in Arkansas and two in Tennessee, as Ike continued on its deadly course.

The storm carved a path of destruction from the Mississippi Valley to the Great Lakes, with hurricane-force winds hitting Kentucky and flooding reported as far north as Chicago, Illinois.

President George W. Bush said Monday that Ike’s devastating path through key oil refining areas would bring “upward pressure” on already soaring gasoline prices.

At least 10 offshore oil platforms were damaged in the storm, while Houston-area oil refineries that produce 20 percent of the nation’s gasoline remained shuttered and offline.

“One of the big pushes we are working on today, aggressively, is to get the Houston Ship Channel back to a free flow of commerce and traffic,” said Senior Chief Petty Officer Steve Carleton of the US Coast Guard.

“Our goal is to get the refineries that are not online the oil they need, to get up and running,” added Carleton.

Two oil rigs were adrift in the Gulf due to the storm and another remained unaccounted for, the Houston Business Journal reported.

Bush planned to travel to Texas Tuesday to see the devastation first hand, saying he expected to hear from “very frustrated” storm victims.

“And my message will be that, ‘We hear you and we’ll work as hard and fast we can to help you get your lives back up to normal,” said Bush, whose response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 drew widespread criticism.

The amphibious assault ship USS Massau left Norfolk, Virginia, Monday bound for Galveston , with the US Army corps of engineers trying to reopen Houston ports and channels.

An estimated 20,000 people on the Texas coast ignored evacuation orders and tried to ride out the tempest, despite warnings of “certain death” from the national weather service.

Simon Chabel of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) told AFP that as of late Sunday 2,100 people had been rescued throughout Texas, after Ike splintered houses, flooded roads and felled trees. Emergency teams also helped 1,635 people evacuate.

In rubble-strewn Houston, the fourth most populous US city, a week-long night curfew has been imposed because of flooding and the danger of downed power lines.

Local authorities in Houston and Galveston told residents to boil water as a precaution amid fears that broken sewers and a disrupted water supply could trigger health emergencies.

On the devastated island city of Galveston, 11 people were rescued from the battered remains of a large sea front Flagship hotel built on stilts.

By the time rescuers reached the site Monday the hotel’s walls had blown away by the force of the rising sea and ferocious 110-mph winds.

The number of households without electricity across the Gulf Coast and Midwest was still in the millions. Of 2.6 million households in Texas, power had been restored to 500,000 customers as of Monday morning, the utility company Centerpoint said.

Officials meanwhile told evacuees to hold off returning home.

“Galveston has been hit hard. We have no power. We have no gas. We have no communications. We’re not sure when any of that will be up and running,” Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas said.

“Do not come back to Galveston,” she said in a plea to her city’s residents. “You cannot live here at this time.”

Conducting in-depth interviews of people who survived the Indian Ocean tsunami or those who lost their loved ones in the disaster, nurse researchers found that such individuals went through a complex process of trauma and grief.Research collaborators from Norway-based Haugesund University College and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have revealed that they talked to people about their emotions and attitudes to life following the tragedy.

They observed that the emotions expressed by the study participants ranged from the initial pleasure of being on a dream holiday, through to the trauma of the event, their grief and loss and the way that families pulled together to come to terms with what had happened.

The earthquake off the coast of Sumatra on 26 December 2004, and the resulting tsunami, are estimated to have killed somewhere in the region of a quarter of a million people. They included 543 Swedish tourists, including 140 children under the age of 18. A further 66 Swedish children lost at least one parent.

“We carried out one-to-one and group interviews with 19 people recruited in collaboration with the Swedish Red Cross to find out how the event had affected them. The paper just published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing looks at their initial reactions to being caught up in this international tragedy and we will be reporting our longer term findings in due course,” says the study’s lead author, Dr. Maj-Britt Raholm.

The team started the interviews with the 13 women and six men, aged from 24 to 67 years, 21 months after the tsunami. Interviews were undertaken a further five times, at eight-week intervals.

Twelve of the people interviews were on holiday when the tsunami struck, and included a man who lost his daughter and his mother and a couple who lost their child.

The other seven participants were at home in Sweden.

Some lost as many as four family members, including children, in the tragedy.

“The experiences of the tsunami survivors and their relatives revealed a comprehensive picture, which broke down into three distinct phases. These can be summarised as experiencing the core of existence, a changed understanding of life and the power of communion,” says Dr. Raholm.

The researchers found that relatives at home felt desperately isolated, and that getting the news that a loved one had died was associated with pronounced physical and mental sensations, like a heavy body and amnesia.

“I threw myself on the floor and wanted to rip the skin from my body,” said one woman.

“The papers wrote about them but it wasn’t part of our reality,” said another.

The study also revealed that common grief and loss united people, and brought together even broken relationships.

When the survivors returned, relatives became very protective.

“It is pretty strange that something good came out of this horrible experience,” said one survivor who became closer to one’s siblings.

Writing about their findings in the Journal of Advanced Nursing, the researchers said that feedback from disasters like the tsunami were essential as they could help shape future care.

“Healthcare professionals have an important role to play in caring for the victims of major disasters, as the effects can last for many years and in some cases people never recover from them,” says Dr. Raholm.

“We believe that it is important that nurses and nursing students have the knowledge they need to care for patients who have gone through life-changing traumas. We hope that our research will provide insight into the complex experiences and needs of those directly involved in major disasters like the 2004 tsunami. The more we learn from disasters that have already happened, the better prepared we can be for those that will inevitably happen in the future,” the researcher adds.

The world’s first cloned dog has become a father following the first successful breeding of cloned canines, South Korean researchers said on Thursday.

The Afghan hound named Snuppy successfully impregnated two cloned bitches of the same breed through artificial insemination, a Seoul National University research team said in a statement.

“This is the first time in the world that puppies have been born from cloned parents,” team leader Lee Byung-Chun said. One of the ten puppies born between May 14 and 18 died but nine others are healthy, he said.

The only panda born at a U.S. zoo so far this year was placed in an incubator on Monday for closer monitoring by zookeepers after visitors flocked to watch mother and child on a live video feed at Zoo Atlanta.

Zoo officials said in a release they wanted to more closely watch the tiny, hairless cub — which is the size of a stick of butter — based on the behavior of the cub and its mother, Lun Lun, in the zoo’s birthing den.

Zoo spokeswoman Simone Griffin wasn’t able to provide further information about the situation but said the video feed has been suspended.

The Panda cub, the gender of which hasn’t yet been determined, was born Saturday, just a week before the second birthday of Mei Lan, the zoo’s first panda cub.

“You can go to every zoo and see elephants, but you can’t go to every zoo and see pandas,” said Christy Moonan, whose two children, Mia, 3, and Collin, 5, brought small stuffed panda toys with them to watch the cub on television screens in the zoo’s panda habitat.

Three other U.S. zoos house pandas, which are endangered: San Diego, Memphis and Washington, D.C.

Mei Lan and dad, Yang Yang, napped in separate rooms of the indoor part of the panda habitat on Monday. Zoo officials will keep Yang Yang apart from his new cub as they have with Mei Lan, because male pandas in the wild typically don’t stay with their offspring.

Zoo officials inseminated Lun Lun with Yang Yang’s sperm in April. An ultrasound on Thursday confirmed zookeepers’ suspicions that the procedure was a success.

“A lot of people wonder whether this is less exciting for us because it’s our second birth,” Wilson said. “Every giant panda birth is important. We are just as excited about this birth as Mei Lan’s.”

Mei Lan’s birth was a landmark event for the zoo, drawing in thousands of visitors and generating a huge number of hits on the online panda cam. Weekend attendance figures weren’t yet available Monday, but zoo officials said they’re expecting them to be higher than normal because of the new arrival.

Wealthy Mexicans, terrified of soaring kidnapping rates, are spending thousands of dollars to implant tiny transmitters under their skin so satellites can help find them tied up in a safe house or stuffed in the trunk of a car.

Kidnapping jumped almost 40 percent between 2004 and 2007 in Mexico according to official statistics. Mexico ranks with conflict zones like Iraq and Colombia as among the worst countries for abductions.

The recent kidnap and murder of Fernando Marti, 14, the son of a well-known businessman, sparked an outcry in a country already hardened to crime.

More middle-class people also are also seeking out the tiny chip designed by Xega, a Mexican security firm whose sales jumped 13 percent this year.

The company injects the crystal-encased chip, the size and shape of a grain of rice, into clients’ bodies with a syringe. A transmitter then sends signals via satellite to pinpoint the location of a person in distress.

Cristina, 28, who did not want to give her last name, was implanted along with seven other members of her family last year as a “preventive measure.”

“It’s not like we are wealthy people, but they’ll kidnap you for a watch … Everyone is living in fear,” she said.

The chips cost $4,000 plus an annual fee of $2,200.

Most kidnappings in Mexico go unreported but independent analysts say there were 6,500 abductions last year, many of them “express kidnapping” where the victim is grabbed and forced to withdraw money from automatic cash machines.

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Official statistics show 751 kidnappings in Mexico last year but most abductions go unreported and the crime research institute ICESI says the number could have been as high as over 7,000 in 2007.

Xega, based in the central Mexican city of Quererato, designed global positioning systems to track stolen vehicles until a company owner was kidnapped in broad daylight in 2001. Frustrated by his powerlessness to call for help, the company adapted the technology to track stolen people.

Most people get the chips injected into their arms between the skin and muscle where they cannot be seen. Customers who fear they are being kidnapped press a panic button on an external device to alert Xega which then calls the police.

“Before, they only kidnapped key, well-known economically successful people like industrialists and landowners. Now they are kidnapping people from the middle class,” said Sergio Galvan, Xega’s commercial director.

President Felipe Calderon has come under heavy pressure in recent weeks to stamp out violent crime. He is to host a high-level meeting on Thursday of security chiefs and state governors.

Outside of Mexico, U.S. company VeriChip Corp uses similar radio-wave technology to identify patients in critical condition at hospitals or find elderly people who wander away from their homes.

But Xega sees kidnapping as a growth industry and is planning to expand its services next year to Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela.