First a brief Introduction to Asana:

Asana is a modern web application that keeps teams in sync, a shared task list where everyone can capture, organize, track, and communicate what they are working on in service of their common goal. Rather than trying to stay organized through the tedious grind of emails and meetings, teams using Asana can move faster and do more — or even take on bigger and more interesting goals.

At Vaatsalya, one of our biggest challenges when we take over an existing hospitals was to smoothly transition the operations over, and bring in Vaatsalya practices. This is easier said than done, as there are hundreds of things involved – starting from documentation, signages, contracts with vendors, HR orientation, employee records, ambulances, inventory tracking, renovation of facilities, stationary, medical records..the list goes on and on. I think right now we use a 140+ point checklist for transition.

Our routine was to put together this checklist beginning of every project (initially on spreadsheets that were mailed out daily! and later on Google Docs) and about 30 of our team members would update this on a daily basis. As usual, there were many linked activities and deadlines would slip, things will fall between the cracks and lot of coordination was involved.

For the recent transition for our Malur hospital, we tested Asana. Whew! what a great piece of mind. Individual tasks can be assigned, tracked, followed and closed. Great alerts on due dates and pending tasks. Everyone knows where we are on various tasks/deadlines. And best of all, this can be done right from emails which directly go into Asana to update status of the task/project.

We have now moved most of our projects to Asana and will be posting more of our experiences here.

About Vaatsalya (http://www.vaatsalya.com) Vaatsalya is India’s first hospital network focused on semi-urban and rural areas. While 70% of India is living in semi-urban and rural areas, 80% of India’s healthcare facilities are located in urban/metro areas. Vaatsalya is bridging this gap by building and managing hospitals/clinics in semi-urban and rural areas and bringing healthcare services where it is needed most.