Digital Healthcare Services: Enabling Easy Access In Post-pandemic India

Healthcare delivery in India is experiencing a paradigm shift today. This transformation is becoming a reality due to digital healthcare, which has the potential to improve the ease and access to quality healthcare across the country. The focus on telehealth in particular has magnified post the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a time when most of the hospitals suspended OPD services while others experienced a 70 per cent to 80 per cent drop in patient visits due to fear of infection. In such a scenario, remote consultations or digital home healthcare emerged as reliable options for patients.

Pandemic push to digital healthcare

The Government of India released the Telemedicine Practice Guidelines in March 2020, just before the first countrywide lockdown. This ensured that the digital consultation channel gained popularity during the strict lockdown which was necessary to control the pandemic spread. The well-timed guidelines helped clear the doubts related to telemedicine and digital healthcare delivery and paved the way for health-tech start-ups to popularize the channel. The official telemedicine guidelines have legalized the process and offer various benefits to the people. Now, they are able to access quality healthcare within their homes without any additional contagion risk in a hassle-free manner. The costs of telemedicine are usually lower than what one paid for an in-person consultation especially when we take into account the time and money spent on commuting to a medical facility.

India is already well-equipped with the digital technology access to leverage this traction towards digitization of healthcare. Today, healthcare providers, technology companies, MNCs, authorities and health-tech start-ups are all required to work cohesively to create a holistic ecosystem under the aegis of National Digital Health Mission as announced by the Prime Minister last year.

The opportunity

As per a study conducted in 2019, India has a shortage of nearly 600,000 doctors and about 2 million nurses. This is a critical gap which has kept conventional healthcare delivery system overburdened and inaccessible to the masses for several decades. Digital and remote healthcare now offers a great option to help overcome this challenge in a convenient and affordable manner for all. The transformation has been an all-round improvement in healthcare. FICCI had released a report sometime back stating that the online pharmacies witnessed up to double the sales during the early stages of the lockdown and it has made the start-ups and ecommerce investors’ community interested in the sector.

A rapidly growing and highly impactful area in the pandemic times has been the ‘tele-ICU’, a technology driven service allowing intensivists to remotely manage critical patients from a centralized command centre instead of going to each patient’s bedside. Through the technology, a single intensivist is able to manage 5-6 times more patients than possible conventionally. The lack of ICU as well as other hospital beds in India is well known and has unfortunately caused a lot of fatalities during the pandemic. This shortage is now expected to be overcome by widespread adoption of tele-ICU technologies in India.

The way ahead

Digitization of healthcare augurs well for Indian healthcare ecosystem. However, we need to rapidly integrate latest technology and care practices into the mainstream where the majority of service providers continue to rely on legacy and incompatible systems. Through a holistic revamp of infrastructure and services, the country can develop a stronger supporting system for healthcare delivery. Even though the primary channel of healthcare delivery is expected to remain the in-person consultation and monitoring services, virtual visits, remote consultations and monitoring will ensure superior universal healthcare access to all Indians.

Vaibhav Tewari

Guest Author The author is Co-founder and CEO, Portea Medical