Columbia Asia Hospital Sarjapur Road is a high end super speciality hospital with state of the art infrastructure, renowned super specialists in all medical and surgical specialties and follows global protocols of clinical care. Our hospital is the largest unit of the Columbia Asia group in Asia. It is equipped with latest technology and equipment for diagnosis and treatment, and is extremely digitised with Comprehensive Electronic Medical Record that captures all the diagnosis, prognosis prescriptions, investigation reports and clinical notes for each and every patient right from his/her arrival in OPD or Emergency Room to in-patient admission and right to the final discharge from the hospital. In the last 3 years, our hospital has catered to more than 2 Lakh patients, having performed over 5000 surgeries on neonates, children and adults including complex heart surgeries, neuro surgeries and organ transplants, and has also helped the community conduct various initiatives aimed at health awareness and preventive health care. For our operational and clinical excellence we have received many awards and recognitions in the past few years including Express Healthcare award for Operational Excellence in 2019, Times Heathcare Achievers Award 2019 and Best Gastroenterology and Hepatology department in a hospital by Economic Times Health Awards 2019-20.

Our hospital has been instrumental in managing the pandemic situation since May 2020 and was one of the first hospitals in the city to set up a flu clinic outside the hospital building in early days of the pandemic to screen and test potentially infected patients. Our hospital has independently treated and saved lives of more than 320 critically ill elderly patients admitted to our ICU during the pandemic and revived them back to good health. We have not only treated patients coming directly to us in our OPDs and emergency, but have also supported another 20 smaller hospitals and nursing homes in our catchment to refer their complex, critical and deteriorating patients to us: in this way we have been able to cater to nearly all the other medical centres in a 5km radius during the pandemic. Our ambulance and emergency services cover a much larger radius throughout the city and have been able to retrieve patients in traumatic accidents or with emergency like critical conditions through the day and night. The presence of 24X7 blood bank, in house specialists, and high end radiology and lab services enable us to cater to any kind of ailment or patient condition round the clock. We regularly do multi-disciplinary meetings with an assorted team of super specialists for complex cases where doctors from various specialties discuss the case together and also advise and counsel the patient family together on the prognosis and line of treatment.

COVID 19 has shown us unprecedented times and the challenges ahead of us in March this year seemed herculean at the time. However we were able to action clearly crafted, deliberated and detailed protocols and policies and device new strategies as the pandemic days moved along and the number of cases grew each month. First and foremost what was important to us was maintaining safety for our patients and caregivers within the hospital premises. We implemented this by making flu clinic and suspected Covid screening areas outside the building; ensuring diligent triaging and screening of each and every person entering the building – be it patients, employees or doctors; ensuring scrupulous and frequent cleaning and disinfection of all the Outpatient, Inpatient and public areas of the hospital including all the common touchpoints; and providing the right personal protective gear or PPE to all our doctors and employees. Besides this our emphasis was on training – to ensure our staff practices hand hygiene, social distancing, wears appropriate PPE and is vigilant to see any instances of infection and report the same. We then went a step ahead and segregated areas in the hospital – we have a 10 floor tall building with 6 separate modular Operating theatres, and hence we cut off two separate floors in the building where the patients suspected of COVID and awaiting test results and the patients who were COVID positive were admitted respectively. Both these floors have segregated air supply and air conditioning and triple viral filtration which keeps their air supply cut off from the rest of the building – in essence these floors are negative pressure and isolated completely from the rest of the building. Similarly in Operating theatre – one OT was segregated having negative pressure and a separate AHU for operating any potential Covid patients. Emergency area too had segregation of beds for any patients suspected of Covid coming with acute conditions and a separate ambulance was used to bring in any fever patients. Besides we also created a new negative pressure ICU and HDU and segregated a labour delivery suite with negative pressure for separately managing covid patients. All these measures put in place a full-fledged mechanism of ensuring zero infections to any patients, doctors and employees and a 100% safe environment for all non covid patients. In the last 7 months, we have been able to successfully operate on more than 30 Covid positive and recovered patients requiring urgent surgeries and also deliver healthy babies for over 10 Covid positive expecting mothers.

Our infection control committee was extremely active in daily auditing of these practices and weekly clinical meetings were used to discuss clinical protocols, new medicines and new therapies being used for various patients and so on. We were able to save the life of a critically ill 90 yrs old obese covid positive patient using plasma therapy and involving consultants from 6 disciplines in the course of the treatment.

On the OPD side, we enabled digitisation to ensure continuity of care with our patients while helping them minimise their visits to the hospital. We used tele medicine to connect with our existing patients as well as extend our services as far and wide as possible. We have been using tele consultations, tele counsellings connecting our specialists to over 50 patients daily; we have also implemented various home care solutions of home health checks, home sample collections, home delivery of medicines and home physiotherapy for our patients. Today we have patients from all over Karnataka and many from other states as well connecting with our doctors every day.

We also used remote monitoring and remote care in managing over 100 mild and asymptomatic covid patients at home using remote monitoring devices and online consultations. Our doctors and nurses could remotely monitor their vitals and medical condition and consult with them on daily basis and recommend any further home tests needed or get any more medicines to be delivered to their homes as needed.

We are happy and honoured to have helped manage large number of covid patients referred by the Govt in our hospital too and look forward to working with the community and the Govt to manage the pandemic through the end and also support in the inoculation process as it begins in our state.