Engineers for Healthcare!

Who better to validate an engineer's contributions than the completely different species of doctors of which I am a proud member. Fortunately, the lines are blurring, and it's for the greater good of humanity everywhere. With people expecting a better value for their money, in terms of their spending in healthcare, expecting better life expectancy and quality of life in general, it becomes imperative for innovations in healthcare, and that is where the engineers come into the picture in the greater scheme of things. While their contributions are indispensable in creating the futuristic world that we can only imagine our future generations will inhabit, to get there, you need healthy bodies to sustain yourself and your genealogy, and that comes by improving health care services. Therefore, as far as I can comment on the contributions of engineers in the future, it will be primarily focused on innovations in healthcare.

Is it too much to ask engineers working towards advancing healthcare services instead of wracking their brains over the next Google or Tesla? But then, the quintessential question remains, if not now, then when? With the world just having survived a pandemic and trying to heal from the wounds, both physical and emotional, the time to invest in innovations in healthcare is appropriate, and that is exactly what happening world over and in India. With the government's readiness to fund healthcare innovations in the form of grants to investors slowly venturing into technology-driven startups, the market and the opportunities are clearly on the rise. This is where my peers and I come into the picture. In a course structured for engineering and medical professionals, what I learned primarily is ?respect. Mutual respect, if not admiration, is the way forward. Considering the ultimate goal is the betterment of humanity, who does it or how it's done holds much less significance than it may seem in the doer's head.

When the world is evolving at a damagingly rapid phase, leaving the healthcare industry functioning to age-old methods to satisfy the ego of very few is not wise. Of course, the arguments supporting the older techniques are many and very much legitimate, but that doesn't mean we turn our backs to newer possibilities, for possessing a liberal mindset is the only way of survival in this fast-paced, ever-changing world. For the sake of the survival of the doctors themselves, they may have to think, analyze and do things in ways never heard /tried before, but that's life, and that is how it has always been, you take the plunge first and learn to swim on the go, at least in cases of breakthroughs, of which healthcare revolution is a part of.

Engineering has always given us solutions to live comfortably and better than the generation before us. The time has come for it to show us ways to live better than we did a year or a month before. Living a better quality of life relies on people's physical and mental well-being. While people do want hyperloop, bullet trains, etc., they need early cancer detection, remote healthcare management, daily well-being monitoring also. Considering the booming industry of healthcare which is predicted to be a valuation of $50 billion in 2025 in India, putting together the engineering brains of the nation to improve its healthcare stats seems like a good idea. The results obtained when people of varying calibers collaborate, learning and unlearning from each other, will be worth the time, effort, and, most importantly, money spent.

Article credits - Dr Dr. Anjali Rajeev