The Interplay between Doctors & Patients

At BW Businessworld’s 2nd Annual Healthcare Summit and 40 under 40 awards ceremony in Bangalore, there was a panel discussion with the topic - “Empowering Doctors & Patients through Collaborative and Patient-Centric Diagnostics.” The members of the panel consisted of - Dr. Aakaar Kapoor, Founder and Partner (CICL) & Chief of Radiology (CXR), Kabir Mahajan, Associate Director, Mahajan Imaging, Dileep Mangsuli, Head of Development Centre, Siemens Healthineers, Zoya Brar, Founder, Core Diagnostics, Raghavendra Goud Vaggu, Global CEO, Empee Diagnostics.

Dr Arjun Dang, CEO, of Dr Dang’s Labs, moderated the panel discussion and started by stating that, “Currently when you look at diagnostics and healthcare, there is so much chatter and so much happening. At the end of the day, we need to aim for the benefit of the patient. The session will aim to explore the transformative potential of the evolving relationship between diagnostic laboratories and doctors in India, focusing on aspects such as quality of care, patient centricity and the utilisation of technology.” Building a patient-centric model completely in healthcare is key and becoming more clinical is their aim.

Moving on, Dr Aakaar Kapoor, Founder and Partner (CICL) & Chief of Radiology (CXR) said, “I believe I am not only a radiologist, but a clinical radiologist. Single speciality is a profitable way forward. I also feel that I can understand the needs of the patient at a micro level. Pathology, Neurology, Radiology and Cardiology are very important. I feel it is the need of the hour for a patient to receive the right diagnosis at the right time and we need to have a comprehensive understanding of the problem.”

On another very interesting note, Kabir Mahajan, Associate Director, of Mahajan Imaging stated that, “In terms of technology, operationally it as there are ethical and legal challenges as patients don’t want to share all their data on an online platform. Technology now allows us today to interact with patients and clinicians in a larger way. I believe that there will be one report which would be generated in the future which would combine insights from Imaging, Lab Medicine, Genomics, and clinical data and there would be a speciality called ‘Integrated Diagnostician’ which we believe would be generating that one report – and that would be the focal point on which decisions would be made by the clinicians.”

Talking about research and looking at the larger picture, and also understanding the synergy between a lab and data-driven decisions based on research, Dileep Mangsuli, Head of Development Centre, Siemens Healthineers commented by voicing his opinions, “Today if you look at technology playing a huge role and after Covid the advancements and lot more needs to happen. Any clinician should create vertical data. Creating insights with this data was difficult before, but now with the advancement of technology, it is possible. Data is going to create impactful results.”

Zoya Brar, Founder, of Core Diagnostics said that, “All the modalities that we are talking about, especially esoteric testing are all developing in a fragmented manner. There is no integrated view right now in these terms. The reason is not that the technology is bad or not good enough. The problem is context. Context currently is the provider. We need to add a Meta layer on all our systems which is patient-centric. The clinician also has a very important role to play.”

Raghavendra Goud Vaggu, Global CEO, Empee Diagnostics, mentioned that, “Microarray technology access program was introduced in India. There were 4 adaptors of this technology. When technology comes from the western part of the world to India, it is quite expensive.”

On a conclusive note, he said that data collation and data mining was very difficult before but in the last 1 year, we can see that it is precision oriented and genomics has come into play.