Digital healthcare innovations disrupting traditional healthcare delivery models in India

With rapid advancement in medical and information technology in the past decade, the feasibility of digital healthcare has come to the forefront in bridging the accessibility and affordability gap especially in developing countries like India. India being one of the most populated nations, faces problems in serving the healthcare needs of a large populace and the problem is further compounded as over two-thirds of the doctors reside in urban areas, where only thirty percent of the population is concentrated. Hence, the ubiquity of mobile phone technology, internet connectivity and cloud computing has engendered an extremely conducive ecosystem for the remote healthcare delivery in India, also commonly known as telemedicine. It involves diagnosing or treating a patient at a remote site, with a medical practitioner at the hospital end, enabled through information and communication technology. Developing nations do not have entrenched regulatory frameworks, which helps them in developing as fertile grounds for product and business model innovations. India has thus pioneered efforts to bridge its burgeoning healthcare gap by constantly experimenting with the impact of such technologies in a multiple medical application areas ranging from radiology, ophthalmology and cardiology. Product innovations more attuned to operate in the resource poor environments (lack of electricity, maintenance) have also acted as key enablers for the ecosystem, along with a focus on the production of low cost rugged equipments.

Private hospital providers such as Apollo hospitals, Narayana Hrudyalaya, Aravind Eye Care etc have taken a lead in conducting multiple proof of concept studies and have now developed scalable operational models, with the aim of maximizing the healthcare impact amongst targeted populations using telemedicine technology. Mobile telemedicine vans are an example of the adoption of this technology to cater to the needs of remote and underserved populations, wherein a large number of people can undergo diagnosis of ailments through internet technology and save on the travel time and costs of poor people living on less than a dollar a day.

While initially multiple stakeholders were experimenting with the idea of digital healthcare to bridge accessibility issues, reasonable maturity and sophistication in the product and supporting internet infrastructure has led them to believe that this form of socio-technological innovation can supplement and in some places supplant the need for traditional healthcare delivery models. Integration of healthcare data and operational improvement at the provider sites are acting as enablers of a system where citizens can demand healthcare almost instantaneously at the click of a mobile phone button or an application. The applications have increased from simple teleconsultations to more sophisticated forms including image digitization technology, which are now used to cater to the entire healthcare continuum ranging from prevention (disseminating important information through videoconferencing), diagnosis ( images of retina sent via fundus camera for treating cataract patients), treatment ( remote surgeries, e-ICU) and monitoring ( home monitoring from remote locations using telemedicine solutions).  Thus, the synergies brought by the progress of communication technologies (IoT, Cloud, Mobile internet) has mobilized the healthcare community to discover ways in which to rapidly transform traditional approaches to healthcare delivery, by taking it out of merely the boundaries of a hospital, as we know it.

References:

http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/business-technology/our-insights/disruptive-technologies

https://www.asianhhm.com/healthcare-management/from-drawers-to-digital

http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-four-global-forces-breaking-all-the-trends