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How digital healthcare has been a boon in 2020

Source: , Posted On:   26 December 2020

How digital healthcare has been a boon in 2020 - ET HealthWorldhttps://health.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/health-it/79961572?utm_source=RSS Content extracted from https://health.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/health-it/79961572?utm_source=RSS https://health.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/health-it/79961572?utm_source=RSSHow digital healthcare has been a boon in 2020 - ET HealthWorld https://health.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/health-it/79961572?utm_source=RSS How digital healthcare has been a boon in 2020By Shyatto Raha, Founder & Chief Executive Officer- My Healthcare

One of the greatest healthcare outcomes from Covid-19 has been the emergence of telemedicine as an effective medium of healthcare delivery. While both patients and doctors struggled with it at the beginning, both have now learned and adopted it as one of the primary channels of care delivery, especially in urban India. Hospitals and doctors have hesitated using telemedicine for a multitude of reasons in the past - foremost of all was the lack of clarity on regulations governing telemedicine. This changed as the Government rolled out the Telemedicine Guidelines in March 2020, allowing doctors to use all possible channels. The second apprehension was of revenue cannibalisation. Covid-19 broke that myth as well – with all OPDs closed due to lockdowns, most were able to maintain the consultation charges equivalent to the OPDs on these platforms.

India’s telemedicine market is expected to reach $5.5 billion by 2025, spurred by a rise in teleconsultations, telepathology, teleradiology and e-pharmacy. Due to the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown, this has resulted in significant growth in the number of telemedicine platforms in India. Start-ups such as MyHealthcare, Meddo, DocOn, Phable have been added to an existing list of players like Practo, mFine, DocsApp, CallHealth and Lybrate.

The future of telemedicine will depend greatly on creating an effective ecosystem of care around the patient, which will not just connect the patient and doctor but in addition will be able to use technology to assist with delivery of medicines, diagnostics, getting reports back and all this being tracked by doctors on their Electronic Medical Record (EMR) platforms. Emerging start-up MyHealthcare, has been working with their partner hospitals in creating such ecosystems of care.

Access to quality primary care has been a perennial problem of the Indian healthcare sector. A report by Centre for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP) in the US outlined that India has a shortage of around 600,000 doctors and over 2 million nurses. Reports highlight that India has a further shortage of over 150,000 radiologists. The effective and efficient use of telemedicine could help bridge some of this with doctors being able to manage and filter patients who need hospitalisation. For those who do not need hospitalisation, doctors can check the symptoms in patients through telemedicine, advise them about medication, tests required, and review their follow-up if their symptoms aggravate. Various platforms have developed technology solutions that allow patients to be monitored at home, while all their information can be tracked by their doctors. Where medical intervention is needed, the care team can alert hospitals for paramedic intervention.

Pathology companies such as Dr Lal Path Labs, Thyrocare, Pathkind Laboratories have created platform integrations with telemedicine platforms to help process home sample collections, getting their reports back into the patient platforms and delivering the same in real-time to the EMRs for doctors to review and update the patient’s care. Following global trends, telemedicine could also serve as an effective channel for follow up care post hospitalisation and avoid the need for a patient to travel all the way to the hospital.

The challenge of awareness continues to be factor for the success of telemedicine. While private hospitals have made some headway, more out of a necessity rather than building it as a primary channel of care, the greater hope is from the government. There needs to be a significant push in taking telemedicine to wider population. With the changing behaviour of patients and doctors, increased penetration of high bandwidth mobile internet, digital healthcare consumption and the country’s proliferating startup ecosystem, the teleconsultation market alone is expected to grow from USD 100mn today to USD 700mn (a growth of 48%) over the next 5 years. The advent of 5G, artificial intelligence and machine learning will accelerate this further.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETHealthworld.com does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETHealthworld.com shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organisation directly or indirectly.

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