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COVID-19 pandemic – Promoting an overdue digital transformation in diagnostics

The pandemic has drastically altered the perception of diagnostics. From being on the side-lines of the healthcare segment to gaining the center stage, the segment is getting its due. Medical diagnostics has become the first line of defense for disease containment as it reveals the prevalence and spread of disease. It has become the pillar around which COVID management policies are being framed in India and across the world. WHO’s T3 – test, treat and, track – model cannot sustain without diagnostics playing its role. Medical terms such as RT-PCR, antibody tests, antigen tests, and rapid diagnostic tests have found way into common conversions.

Over the past several thousand years, the diagnostic science and technology has revolutionized several times over to bring us to a stage when around 70 percent of medical decisions depend on diagnostic tests. With the outbreak of pandemic, it has become the foremost weapon to fight the biggest public health crisis the world has ever seen.

The advances in diagnostic technology today are helping us deliver preventive and curative treatment. However, despite these advances, the most amazing technological interventions are yet to happen in the future. The pandemic has no doubt accelerated digital transformation in healthcare, and as healthcare business leaders strategize for the post-pandemic world, one thing is evident: digital transformation has just begun. The future of the industry will include taking diagnostics to people and empowering them with tools and information while focusing on building diagnostic capabilities for labs and healthcare facilities. It will be an era of high-end personalized diagnostics co-existing with highly efficient point-of-care devices keeping real-time monitoring of vital parameters.

This would also be a time to usher in Clinical Lab 2.0, armed with a taskforce of marketing and lab operations, doctors working together. Unlike clinical data, laboratory data is often structured and is open to many retrievable and analytical methods. Thus, the domain of clinical informatics has its roots in clinical laboratory, which can give rise to laboratory information systems, as the first form of the electronic health record.

The role of diagnostics is that of an enabler. It needs to support clinicians with evidence of the long-term effects of preventive and therapeutic interventions and not just episodic records. There is also a pressing need to integrate our laboratory systems, which should seamlessly connect and identify patients despite their geographic mobility. With the launch of National Digital Health Mission (NDHM), every citizen is expected to have a unique health ID, digitized health records, and a registry of doctors and health facilities. This will help healthcare companies like SRL to collaborate with NDHM as health information provider (HIP) to collect and verify unique health IDs, Link pathology report with health ID and digitally share pathology report with other health information users (HIU) based on patient’s consent. When a patient is better able to transact, share data, and shift between healthcare providers seamlessly and securely, there is an advantage in driving industry-level change that enables better care for people.

The adoption of extended reality, which includes virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, is opening new frontiers of diagnosis, especially in diagnosis and monitoring of cognitive ailments, such as Alzheimer’s disease, autism, dementia, and others. With 5G telecommunications becoming a reality in this decade, various digital technologies, including AI, IoT, and extended reality will unfold their tremendous potential in the diagnostics space. SRL Diagnostics is already making headway in the direction, and with its collaboration with Microsoft Azure and AI innovations, it aims to enhance digital pathology for population screening.

The first phase of this technology focused on AI models in cytology. It gave an algorithm that helped screening of liquid-based cytology slides for cervical cancer. The second phase is involving AI models in histopathology, majorly focusing on breast, colorectal, and prostate cancers. The technology is being designed to effectively increase the objectivity in screening digital pathology slides. It is expected to link up to a Big Data system and to identify references to similar reported cases.

For India to leverage the rapidly advancing digital technologies, several policy-level steps need to be initiated to create supportive infrastructure, promote public-private collaborations, and facilitate smooth adoption of technologies. With a robust ecosystem of supportive policy-making and strong IT framework, India will speed ahead on the road to the next level of diagnostics technology.

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