Indian healthcare ready to go to the next stage

Fuelled by rising challenges like Covid-19, the HealthTech sector is leveraging emerging technologies, advanced analytics, and diverse data to transform healthcare.

Healthcare/HealthTech startups in India are currently vertical-focused. Many digital healthcare startups are getting merged or acquired by larger players to expand their services to provide holistic healthcare under one umbrella. The expectation of the customer is changing as they experience these services. Consequently, we will see a lot of traditional healthcare players adopting technology to serve their users.

The current Tech/Trends

Implementing the lessons of the pandemic with digital transformation to manage beyond peak demand, remote treatment for routine procedures and ailments, and productivity enhancement for the sector are the key tech trends currently. These include:

Telemedicine: Nearly every hospital implemented a version of telemedicine during the pandemic. Doctors were able to manage a higher patient load with lesser work stress while patients were freed from long waiting time for their turn.

Arun Meena, Founder & CEO, RHA Technologies

Generative AI can be used to produce novel and realistic visual, textual, and animated content with less time and effort. It uses AI/ML to generate artificial content with minor changes or completely new at faster rate. As per Gartner, by 2025, generative AI will be used by 50 per cent of drug discovery and development initiatives.

Generative AI has a wide variety of applications that are useful to Healthcare – Creating a realistic version of x-ray, CT scans and other radiographs images, therefore making diagnosis easy. It will make it possible to create a high resolution of images without exposing the patients to high doses of radiation.

Patient Health data: Big Data and analytics are allowing organisations to implement patient CRM thus creating life-long value for patients and prevention of critical issues. This is also creating higher patient confidence for elective and preventive procedures.

Smart Document Transformation with eSignatures: The complete patient record from diagnosis to admission to treatment to discharge are a digitally automated workflow enabling complete index and audit trail.

Private/Hybrid Cloud: Patient information privacy is extremely important and cloud technologies have long proven their capability in ensuring the same.

Health Tech intervention across Preventive, Diagnostic, Curative, Rehabilitative, and Palliative stages of patients is driving improved recovery.

Big Data & Analytics: With the foundation of connected IT layered with years of available data – Big Data and analytics will be a force multiplier for the sector.

Blockchain Adoption: Blockchain will create a tamper-proof and auditable system to ensure the patient privacy is not violated. Doctor patient privileges will be furthered with blockchain implementation.

AI-Robotics: Robotics combined with AI will be the new update to hospitals this year. Their assistance in surgical procedures, radiology, and difficult procedures requiring critically high precision will create a service differentiator.

AI-powered drug discovery: Investigating a molecule is a time consuming and expensive activity for organisations. AI is able to sift through millions of possibilities to shortlist candidates to investigate further.

The major digital challenges

One of the challenges is connectivity in remote regions of our country, lack of awareness, and digital literacy. According to a study by Nielsen, rural India has 352 million internet users, almost 20 percent higher than urban. However, possibly because of low digital literacy, by the same study, almost 60 percent of the rural population is still not actively using the Internet.

Secondly, the biggest challenge is the fragmented healthcare services hindering seamless delivery. The HealthTech industry needs a more patient-centric ecosystem and an outcome-based approach to address this.

The third issue faced by the industry is digitally delivering care with empathy at scale – because healthcare delivered without empathy is no healthcare at all. This is possible only with the right combination of talent, processes, and tech.

The next major challenge will be the intent and ability to invest in health tech. In some instances, it may also create a larger gap between haves and have-nots. Standardisation and interoperability protocols also need to catch up with the developments underway. In some case moral and ethical issue will need to be settled for widespread adoption.

Galveen Kaur, Co-founder, Connect and Heal

Digitization of healthcare will make services accessible, seamless and transparent. It would also help in the standardization of care protocols across the entire healthcare ecosystem. India is projected to be doing relatively well compared to the rest of the world in health tech. In 2023, we are likely to witness major developments in the product as more and more healthcare providers switch to digital care delivery models.

Digital health the future of HealthTech

Digital HealthTech enabled Stephen Hawkingto contribute scientifically despite his advanced ALS for 55 years. His chair was his mobility enabler. Artificial Intelligence tech helped him speak with minimal body movement. Also, digital HealthTech devices monitored his vitals for proactive interventions.

Human body embedded HealthTech like Pacemaker, and hearing implants are long accepted. Dialysis a tedious process requiring 3-4 hours three times a week will move towards wearable machine and reduce the need for blood thinners. Developments in neurotechnology may also bring the next set of innovations to help manage mental conditions.

Robotics assistive digital health tech for patient life support will be improving the functional capabilities of differentially enabled persons with exoskeletons and prosthetics.

Instances Digital HealthTech embedded in Apple watch saving people with ailments or injuries are widely reported. Connected monitoring tools is helping save lives continually and the impact of digital HealthTech will only grow.

Telehealth growth may slow down

While the pandemic season has shown an unprecedent growth during the pandemic, the growth will surely slow down a bit in 2023. This may not be as severe as what we have seen in the EdTech industry, companies will still have to fight for increasing market share. As the companies offering telehealth expand beyond the metros, digital literacy will play a critical role. It is no more about technology innovation now. It is more about making the UI more intuitive and training a larger mass on how to use the system.

The next big evolution

Year 2023 will be the year when the healthcare sector will move out from the pandemic shadow and focus on the new reality, expectations, and technological advancements. The newest medical technologies that are expected to gain wider adoption are:

Diagnosis powered by AI: AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) integration in healthcare has long been overdue. The beneficial impact on diagnosis, research, and monitoring will give a patient success and productivity boost.

CRISPR: CRISPR gene editing HealthTech is opening radical new treatment possibilities with gene manipulation. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for their ground-breaking work in this field. CRISPR has already shown its impact in the diagnosis of Covid-19. It is expected to create favourable outcomes in immediate future for following more diseases—Cancer, Blood disorders, Blindness, AIDS, Cystic fibrosis, Muscular dystrophy, and Huntington's disease.

Sudipta Sengupta, Founder & CEO, THIP (The Healthy Indian Project), A health literacy Platform

Covid has shown us what health misinformation and disinformation can do. Even with the pandemic settling down the growth of misinformation may not slow down. In a country like India where we have multi-disciplinary medicine system, misleading information continues to flourish – more so in regional languages. With AI chatbots taking over, with discussions moving from open Facebook groups to WhatsApp and Telegram groups – credible health information flow in digital space will suffer and the work of fact checkers are going to be even more difficult. Continuous public health messaging and training needs to tackle this problem.

Electronic Health Records: EHR may not have been successful in many years across the world but then no Government has put its weight behind the system. The Indian Government’s ABHA is a step in the right direction. It has set up a strong foundation and how will build on it will decide the success of India’s EHR story. While startups catering to both doctors and patients in this space have started gaining grounds, it is a lot about changing habits of at grassroot level. It requires sustained efforts.

We will hear more about Wearables, AI and ML: There is a lot of interest around smart watches, continuous glucose monitoring devices, wearable ECG monitors etc. The data captured by these devices will be put through AI and ML and we will see a lot of claims on what these can do. Though the segment will continue to grow and create interest among end users, real impacts will probably still take time to show.

Augmented/Virtual Reality: AR/VR will boost imagery and surgery planning. OTT serial have often depicted benefits of AR/VR and a lot is set to be possible in the real-world. Surgeons will be able to conduct complex procedures in a risk-free manner and reduced time frame.

Anti-aging: Anti-aging initiatives are another set of HealthTech benefitting modern healthcare. The allied fields of Genomics, epigenetics, and stem cell research are all aiding a healthier outcome for patients along with faster recovery to contribute to longer life span goals.

Artificial organs: Artificial organs HealthTech have been researched for long and are constantly improving. They are nevertheless still some distance away from being long term replacements. Artificial heart, eye, and kidney are the most advanced in terms of their capabilities currently and provide hope for many patients in the years to come.

Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) today is all about building a digital platform that makes interoperability between different digital health systems possible. ABDM is a catalyst that can push the digitization of longitudinal records by allowing patients the power and control to share it with various service providers. 

The other big thing that we are likely to witness in health tech is a massive improvement in the accessibility of healthcare. Similar to the digitization of payments brought about a big change, healthcare is sitting at a cusp of disruption. Currently, a significant part of the family health expenses aisdue to OPD situations, whereas the In-Patient Departments (IPDs) requiring hospitalization make up a smaller part of the expenses. The concept of Out Patient Department (OPD) insurance will play an important role in making healthcare more accessible in India as it will take care of out-of-pocket medical expenses. The National Health Authority (NHA) is also setting up a health exchange platform that will digitize and simplify the process of filing health insurance claims. It will also ensure a simplified workflow with a standardized communication protocol between payer and provider to enable digitization of claims processing for health insurance, by IRDAI guidelines.