Healthwire Bureau
New Delhi, February 1: This year’s focus on innovative healthcare technologies is clearly welcoming for those working on novel innovations and applications. There are several inevitable applications to drive successful implementations and outcomes of focus areas such as #TB, #MissionIndradhanush, #FitIndia, #JanArogyaYojana.
Indian population clinical datasets indicate that the highest percentage of TB positive cases are found in the age group of 10 to 24 years (43% positivity rate vs. 17% in >60 years). Ironically the multi-drug resistance is also found to be higher among younger population (22% MDR in 10-24 years vs. 7% in >60 years). Clearly the program requires fundamental rethinking and redesigning by leveraging #dataanalytics and #clinicalresearch.
On similar lines, the pivotal success driver for #MissionIndradhanush is adherence/ compliance towards immunizations. This requires hyper-personalized patient education, leveraging the power of #BehaviouralScience and #AI. The power of IVRS solutions, WhatsApp and enabling on-ground staff / asha workers with technology can ensure desired outcomes.
Use of new-age technology such as IOT devices, smartphones, smart watches etc. to diagnose and monitor real-time health and seeing tangible outcomes through focus on fitness and diet can empower #FitIndia campaign.
With increasing onboarding of hospitals in the flagship ayushman bharat program, there are two critical drivers to ensure efficient and sustainable use of resources: leveraging hyper-personalized patient education to drive patient care and improve health outcomes through focus on primary care and delaying hospitalizations in tertiary care. Also, leveraging #AI / #ML to ensure seamless claims processing and payments is critical to drive sustainability for hospitals in an environment where average pricing is going to get rationalized drastically.
While the broader goal of leveraging cut-throat / novel technologies in healthcare is the right direction, the key question now is whether the budgets get used and allocated for the most meaningful applications and use-cases which can deliver the desired outcomes.
(Mr. Akansh Khurana, Co-Founder and CEO, THB: Technology Healthcare Big Data Analytics.)