Global healthcare experts are looking at digital solutions for improving healthcare infrastructure and providing better care and treatment after people faced severe difficulties reaching out to doctors and hospitals during the Covid-19 pandemic. It wasn’t just the virus but simple fevers, diseases and health concerns that were left unaddressed due to lack of digital services in the healthcare sector .
In India, it was during the Covid-19 pandemic that the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare had approved the use of telemedicine to treat virus patients, since social distancing was a norm at that time and people had to look for alternative solutions to get treated. That’s when technology came to rescue, and caught pace in the Indian healthcare system.
Globally, healthcare experts are of the view that implementing digital solutions is the need of the hour to provide better healthcare facilities to patients going forward .
Professor Ilona Kickbusch, Founding Director and Chair of the Global Health Centre (GCH) at the Geneva based Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies said that one-third of the global population is not connected to the internet and even more people do not have access to Universal Health Coverage (UHC).
“Therefore, they are excluded from digitalised health systems, from online sources of health information and a growing number of digital tools. We need to work with speed and diligence to change this,” she said stressing on the role of governments in bringing regulations and legal frameworks to bring the change.
Professor Kickbusch was speaking at the International Health Dialogue organised by Apollo hospitals in the Capital held over two days. “We must recognise that the digital transformations themselves are determinants of health. They can decide over life and death. They can leave specific health impacts, and they interface with political, societal and economic dynamics, and we need to address those together, accordingly,” she stressed.
Meanwhile, Dr Ratna Devi, Patient Advocate and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Dakshama Health and Education, said that the digital space must also allow patients to report adverse events by concealing their identity. She cited her own example when she got an anti-rabies injection nearly a year ago, causing an adverse reaction . She said, “I wanted to complain against the manufacturer, but was not able to get the required information from the hospital. The hospital’s pharmacy said they did not keep a record of the batch of medicines .”
Offering a solution to rectify the problem, she suggested that everyone should have the ability to report such incidents in an anonymous way using digital means, where the name of the hospital or doctor is not revealed.
“If the people were empowered to bring this to the notice of the authorities, the entire batch of faulty medicine could have been removed. However, because there is no system to capture this data, those injections were probably being given to many more people. Who knows how many people reported the adverse effects and how many didn’t?,” she lamented.
Dr Basant Garg, Additional CEO of National Health Authority (NHA) said that the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) was moving in the right direction as over 32 crore Ayushman Bharat Health Accounts (ABHAs) have been created offering close to two lakh health facilities and nearly 1.39 lakh healthcare professionals have been registered by it .
“The ABDM is providing a Unified Health Interface (UHI) – an open network for digital health services. UHI aims to expand the digital health service market by making it easier for doctor to be searchable, transparent pricing, reducing friction for and enabling easy monetisation of repeat consultations, moving patients towards preventive care,” he said .
Akanksha Sharma, Senior Policy Adviser at Netherlands Consulate in Bengaluru said Netherlands has a healthcare expenditure of nearly EUR 70 billion for a population of about 17 billion people.
“The country has a GDP of approximately EUR 700 billion and its healthcare expenditure is 10 per cent of the GDP. Further, the total number of people employed in the healthcare sector is roughly 1.1 million,” she stated.
She then compared the Indian healthcare system to the Netherlands, saying, “One-third of the Indian population is driven below the poverty line because of healthcare expenses.” However , since healthcare is an emerging sector in India, she said both countries can focus on a partnership to use technology and create cost-effective solutions to provide better patient care.
