Challenges and Redefining Healthcare Landscape
Keynote Address: R. Rengarajan Iyengar
Moderator: Sachin Gaur
Panelists:
• Anjali Kaushik
• Dr. Sanjay Sharma
• Dr. Nimmi Rastogi
• Amit Bhatnagar
• Deepak Mittal
As India evolves from four-cosmo cities to a vast population coming under the modern cities the healthcare landscape evolves tremendously – discuss high profile panelists at the last session of the InnoHEALTH 2017
Opening the discussion, R. Rengarajan Iyengar of HCL Healthcare started very strongly saying, “The need of the hour is to get the authority of the public sector married with the energy and efficiency of the private sector. With changes in the demographics of the country, health care sector is growing into a very profitable sector as more and more cities are emerging as modern cities and expect only the very best in health and medical facilities.”
In support of his belief, he emphasized, “To achieve the above goals, we need to turn to innovative approach of things that may include new technology, newer processes and modern approach to processing and delivery of the best of the facilities. Concepts like telemedicine and cloud computing are also encouraging new players to enter as investors and at the same time luring corporates to invest in this sector.”
Sachin Gaur, took over as the moderator of the session and brought in his international exposure sharing his experience in the Scandinavian countries and opened the discussion with his view: “New Age requires New Solutions.”
Starting with Dr. Anjali Kaushik, he engaged the panelists with their thoughts on the subject.
“When you are handling large data sets, and that too, sensitive data like the details of patients, their illness; their personal details and their current medical status – there’s always a threat of cyber attack and we have recently seen in the case of UK’s NHS site being hacked and data was compromised. India is no exception to this as many hospitals have been subject to hacking leading to a freeze in the system where doctors could not treat patients without any access to their vital information. For this we have to induce digital hygiene and put systems in place to ensure that our dependency on digital platform doesn’t become a liability to the system,” said Dr Anjali Kaushik.
In contrast to the skeptical approach of Dr. Anjali, Sachin added that, “Hacking of data remains a grave concern for depending on that tool, but that’s only one aspect of it. There are, however, larger benefits of this holistic approach of using digitization with innovative tools. The way forward is for different players to gather their efforts and handle the challenge of collating quality and accurate data with a unified effort,” said Sachin.
“This is what I have witnessed during my trips abroad, especially in the Scandinavian countries where even the government contributes to gather data and process it suitably,” he concluded.
Dr. Sanjay Sharma, from Yostra labs and Vital Sense added, “We have made an effort to innovate in the field of scarcity and help in extending trained hands to help patients recover fast. There are always well-wishers with patients in the hospital, and they are close relatives of the patient who, we realized, can be utilized to help the patients recover fast and contribute to extending health care beyond doctors and medical staff. So, we initiated an innovative approach to train these well-wishers who contribute with total honesty and good intent to learn healthcare basics. The results have been amazing and have in fact contributed to relieving nurses who are over-worked and short staffed.”
Close to Delhi, the latest break through in the healthcare sector is Mohalla Clinics and Dr. Nimmi Rastogi, shared her thoughts on the concept as Health Advisor to the Government of Delhi. “Mohalla Clinic is a nofrills attached basic clinic to provide primary health services to people in the neighborhood. The facility has one doctor and four medical staff including a nurse and a compounder. It’s a prefabricated, air-conditioned facility in less than 100 sq yards with two rooms and basic facilities to store medicines and conduct essential tests.”
Elaborating on the facility, Dr Nimmi added, “The facility extends free facilities – free consultation, free medicines and 110 tests are conducted free of cost for anyone, irrespective if they belong to Delhi or not. Within the first year of its operations we are handling 80-100 patients a day using innovative tools and digital platform.”
Adding human element to innovations, Amit Bhatnagar of Accuster Technologies shared his personal and professional opinion on the subject and said, “When you talk of innovations, it must involve the people and not just development of technology. With such a large number of technically qualified manpower available to us, innovations without involving them are missing the bigger picture. Our journey of innovation is based on the fact that more than 85 crore people do not have access to diagnostic facilities as they live in rural areas. Our objective has been to develop technology that can be rugged enough to reach out to these rural grounds and help provide accurate diagnostics leading to better remedies.”
Deepak Mittal, concluded the session spelling out the mission of his company that has gone beyond technology and has extended healthcare by clever use of data in relation to the demographics.
“The mission of our company is to prevent and control diseases, improve quality of care and reduce cost of care. With the help of algorithms and artificial intelligence we can map the trends and predict unexpected ailment attacks with respect to the demographics of the region and population,” explained Deepak.
“For this our dependence on data is crucial and I must share that data in the healthcare sector is probably the worst data with no unified parameters on any filter. So the biggest challenge in executing our intentions with honesty and accuracy totally depends on acquiring and collating good quality data,” concluded Deepak.
“Telemedicine, as a business is a very lucrative platform. The gap between the resources and the users remains very high and in a country like India is not going to be easy to fill that. Telemedicine will be a very reliable option to bridge the gap and that makes it a very viable business option. But, like most business, telemedicine also has challenges that are very unique. Starting with, most start-ups end up replicating what is already there in the market “with improvisations”. What we need is new solutions and not improved solutions. You must think innovatively to innovate things.”
[/vc_cta]“It’s a huge problem and its problem that’s been prevalent for as long as the Clinical Trials themselves. But we often ask ourselves, ‘Do we know how big the problem is?’ And in all fairness, we didn’t know how big the problem is. Research Integrity can be questioned if the Clinical Trials have been unfair in the process and there have been papers that have been withdrawn by Canadian authorities that have been involving questionable practices – especially involving clinical trials.”
[/vc_cta]“We have learnt until now that human body is an amalgamation of cells, tissues and cells. Now, the human body has emerged as a conglomeration of biochemical process that are scattered around and work in close coordination with each other with the sole purpose of keeping the human body alive. Another baffling reality for me is the Ayurveda that introduces us to the benefits of plants and their properties. After all, trees and plants appeared much before the pharma industry. Plants have been in existence for more than two billion years and our pharma is less than 200 years old.”
[/vc_cta]Want to write for InnoHEALTH? send us your article at magazine@innovatiocuris.com
Read all the issues of InnoHEALTH magazine:
InnoHEALTH Volume 1 Issue 1 (July to September 2016) – https://goo.gl/iWAwN2
InnoHEALTH Volume 1 Issue 2 (October to December 2016) – https://goo.gl/4GGMJz
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 1 (January to March 2017) – https://goo.gl/DEyKnw
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 2 (April to June 2017) – https://goo.gl/Nv3eev
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 3 (July to September 2017) – https://goo.gl/MCVjd6
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 4 (October to December 2017) – http://amzn.to/2B2UMLw
InnoHEALTH Volume 3 Issue 1 (January to March 2018) – https://goo.gl/fksdQx
Connect with InnovatioCuris on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/innovatiocuris
Twitter: https://twitter.com/innovatiocuris
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/7043791
Stay updated about IC, visit: www.innovatiocuris.com
