Healthcare trends

We are now in the second year of a pandemic that has so far claimed over 2 million lives globally. Only today, countries and people are aiming to maintain greater distance while the web was meant to fade the boundaries between people across continents.

The healthcare trends we will see in the near future fall into three main categories, healthcare policy, paradigm change in care delivery, and effective use of technology.

The industry can prepare for the future by understanding critical areas to watch within these categories and which events and activities may affect the healthcare ecosystem.

Healthcare policy
The government as well as insurers will need to rethink the way them being payers is affecting the system. The government will have to give up on a long tested and failed low cost policy to enable PPPs and equip the country with better healthcare infrastructure while also making this a sector where investors will not have to struggle to sustain. The past 4–5 years have disincentivized people from investing in healthcare.

Instead, the government will have to bring in tax benefits for people who buy health insurance. This will release the government from the burden of being a payer, while also promoting voluntary purchase of insurance (during these times where people with disposable income are willing to invest in health). Insurers will need to work on better rewards for preventive health. They also need to underwrite risks better and invest in long term products.

Paradigm change in care delivery
The past year has seen people being sceptical to go to hospital due to COVID-19 positive patients being treated in these hospitals. As a result, minor procedures and elective procedures which are non-life threatening viz. hip and knee replacement have been deferred. To get patients back into the formal healthcare system, hospitals will need to engage better through the following:

• Deployment of AI based technologies to identify the at risk patients;
• Communication of benefits of a surgery and a virtual walk through of what to expect during the course of treatment;
• Education of patients regarding outcomes of procedures;
• Pre and post treatment follow ups using call centres/conversational AI to ensure that patients follow protocols.

Effective use of technology
Providers, payers and policy makers will need to reconfigure analytics to make effective use of technology for data driven decision making. The current ways of retrospective analytics by dissecting data points to no end will need to be replaced by real time insights for administrators, insurers and more importantly the patients.

Combining real time inputs from patients regarding their initiatives to maintain a state of health (diet, exercise, sleep, etc.) with their clinical parameters from lab tests to provide them insights on how to maintain or improve their health through automation will hold more value than ever as the affluent Indian who keeps pushing boundaries to move up the commercial and social ladder seeks better inputs on how to make himself/herself better and more equipped for the daily stress of work. Mental health related tech products will only gain greater acceptance and attraction from the tax payers who are getting taxed financially and mentally even further.

The last but most important set of technologies will be tech enabled interventions for children. Learning, mental health, training and education of kids along with health apps enabling parents to address important moments in a child’s life will be the most valuable products.