How India can transform its healthcare industry

The COVID-19 pandemic had ramped up the demand for healthcare, forcing nations to reimagine their healthcare landscape and build a broad base ecosystem for health and wellness.

The need for an integrated healthcare system, a consistent care delivery ecosystem, push for automation, increasing accessibility and affordability has led to a dramatic change in how the sector has been operating over the past year.

Despite the challenges, the pandemic has also brought an opportunity that has opened up new frontiers in the healthcare system and has paved the way for a unique public-private partnership that will hopefully transform the healthcare industry.

In an interview to Shereen Bhan, Dr Devi Shetty, Chairman and ED of Narayana Health said that he is optimistic that India will emerge as the first country in the world to dissociate healthcare from affluence.

“We cannot have the skeleton of manpower involved in managing the healthcare of 1.3 billion people. There has to be a proper strategy in terms of how do we train them and for what length of time. Today if you ask any of the healthcare experts or the people who are managing healthcare from the government that how many doctors are practicing in India? Nobody knows. We go by the historic figure. So we need to have a proper strategy and fortunately a lot of action is happening from the government. So I am optimistic that we will emerge as the first country in the world to dissociate healthcare from affluence.”

“Public health system has good infrastructure but there is no one to utilize them. There aren’t that many doctors, nurses etc. So you may have all the equipment but if there is nobody to do an ultrasound or no one to interpret a CT scan or do an operation, it is pointless having the infrastructure. So what we need is more doctors, nurses and medical technicians. So all we have to do is to increase the productivity of the existing medical colleges. There are enough hospitals in tier II and tier III cities which are starving for doctors. So let the medical colleges be associated with these public hospitals and these young students can be trained there,” he said.

Rajat Verma, MD and Head of Commercial Banking at HSBC India, said he expects healthcare to be in the top 1 or 2 investment priorities post the COVID second wave.

“If I look at the history of healthcare investment over the last 40 years, you have seen points were as a percentage of GDP healthcare investment went down under 1 percent. It is still very low at 3.5 percent but after the COVID second wave if healthcare is not our top 1 or 2 investment priorities then we would have learnt nothing from this lesson. I think the whole insurance scheme of the government seems to be picking up quite well and it has the promise of transforming or delinking healthcare with affluence.” CNBCTV18