Towards a Healthier Tomorrow: How Modern Technologies Will Transform the Future of Healthcare
The Indian healthcare industry suffers from a massive schism. The country has become a hub for medical tourism, with nearly 200,000 patients visiting it annually to get the best medical care at the most affordable prices. High-end tertiary care hospitals, replete with the latest equipment, are major landmarks in tier I and tier II cities; healthcare delivery in such facilities is world-class and state-of-the-art. And yet, the larger healthcare landscape still leaves a lot to be desired.
The benefits of new-age healthcare technology have not yet reached a vast majority of Indian consumers, especially in rural areas; KPMG estimates that most healthcare facilities and service providers are concentrated in urban geographies, and serve around 442 million at best. As a result, most Indians have trouble finding the quality of care that is attracting the rest of the world. Moreover, given that nearly 62 percent of Indians using their personal savings to meet their healthcare expenses, affordability of medical care also becomes a major challenge.
The hurdles to healthcare in India
The major problem is one of the gaps in service delivery, accessibility, availability, and technology adoption, bridging which requires innovative solutions driven by technology. Medical technology will play a strategic role in fostering the change that the Indian healthcare needs to ensure better health outcomes for the population at large. However, the problem extends to the regulatory environment around medical technology and devices in India.
It is ambiguous, complex, and lacks basic transparency. The absence of specific regulations in certain fields leaves patients vulnerable to sub-standard products. In other instances, radical advancements in delivery mechanisms often take years to come to the market, as the ambiguity in processes and systems for regulatory approval takes away the incentive of companies to sell their innovative and need-based solutions.
Healthcare companies have invested massive amounts of time, money, and effort towards upgrading the country’s healthcare sector up to global standards. Unfortunately, the benefits of this investment are yet to trickle down to the masses yearning for technology-driven miracles to tackle the disease, malnutrition, and a variety of other healthcare challenges. While technology might help engage with the threshold problems of accessibility and availability, opaque regulations and the absence of basic infrastructure prevent, limit, and delay the adoption of these solutions within the Indian market.
The technology-driven solutions
The answer might lie in a new wave of technologies poised to disrupt healthcare at the macro level. The prospect of electronic health records will allow for a seamless transition of information from one doctor to another, saving invaluable time and effort that would otherwise be spent dealing with paperwork. Additionally, the digitization of healthcare data opens up the scope for potentially game-changing technologies. AI-driven systems could analyze and parse it, optimizing medical workflows at a variety of levels to enhance diagnostic accuracy, reduce the time taken to deliver the right treatment, and substantially improve patient prognosis.
Early diagnostic accuracy is one of the key areas in which improvement driven by technology would help push Indian healthcare to the next level of effectiveness. A technology-driven solution that could help make the best diagnostic capabilities available to every Indian at lower costs would be tele-radiology, whereby medical images could be transferred through the internet to radiology experts for remote reporting.
For this to work effectively, stable and reliable networked visualization solutions with regulatory compliance and high-quality image processing capacity would be required. Through such systems, experienced radiologists could look at radiology scans of patients who are hundreds of miles away and cannot travel to big cities to meet the medical expert in person. The local doctors’ costs would be reduced too, as there will no longer be a need for such machinery in their clinic. Patients, on the other hand, would save the money they would otherwise have to spend on travel and get better and more accurate results as well.
Getting the right view on the problem
For the foreseeable future, AI-driven optimization solutions would continue to require human interpretation. While the systems would help filter through vast tracts of data and efficiently find patterns, deriving usable insights from it would require a human agent. This human agent would have to be able to translate the insight (i.e., ultrasound-based diagnostic accuracy in Pune is lower than in Bangalore) into a tangible action (e.g., sending ultrasound images to the Bangalore center instead). State-of-the-art smart visualization technology would be a crucial component of turning this solution into a reality.
Stakeholders in the Indian healthcare ecosystem need to find the perfect combination of human resources, technology, devices, and infrastructure if they are to make delivery of solutions more accessible and efficient – which, in this scenario, means lives saved and better outcomes. This makes it imperative for the healthcare sector in India to recognize that the solution for the country’s healthcare challenges will come from greater co-operation and optimization, which is best achieved through better utilization of the technology at their disposal. Doing so could not only help in driving the continued growth of India’s booming healthcare landscape, but also extend essential medical services to every Indian.
