How technology is making inroads into healthcare

By Prashant K Singh and Dipti Jain

Nupur Kumar (name changed), a daily wage labourer hails from Sepahijala district of Tripura, living 30 kms away from the nearest hospital. She is 55, and has been suffering discomfort for the past two days.  

Joining the queue of patients at the healthcare centre, Kumar braces herself up  for  a long wait. An ANM picks up an android tablet, loaded with mPower Heart CDSS app, enquiring, measuring and recording her basic health parameters, such as blood pressure and sugar levels. The in-built algorithm gives immediate feedback, presenting a printable prescription for hypertension, even mentions a date for a follow-up visit, all of this in consonance with prevailing international guidelines. The staff then directs her to the doctor, who reviews the diagnosis , checks the prescribed medication and lifestyle changes, before approving it.

mPower is an electronic Clinical Decision Support System (e CDSS) for Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD), developed by AIIMS, Delhi and Centre for Chronic Diseases and Control. Launched two years ago, the system has already screened over 1,50,000 patients across the state. “For patients from such small and far-flung places, a digital monitoring of health conditions is a pleasant surprise. In each subsequent visit, the software also provides a chronology of the treatment’s progress,” says Dr. Siddharth Maurya, State Project Coordinator, NCD, Public Health Foundation of India.

mPower is one example of how healthcare providers in the country are adopting technology to collect health data, maintain health records and analyse trends, besides improving accessibility to caregivers. Tracxn, itself a data platform of startups, estimates that around 2,820 health-tech startups sprung up in India between 2014 and 2018. Together, these have raised funding of close to $1.6 billion during the period.

LinkedIn’s Top Startups 2019, released today, features two such companies – mfine and Pristyn Care.

Digital technologies have disrupted scores of industries, transformed them and are now set to conquer healthcare too, hitherto untouched. However, the pace of change has been tedious. Unlike other industries, the tech innovators have to deal with multiple stakeholders. The health care ecosystem comprises diverse players: consumers or patients, doctors, employers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, regulatory bodies or the government and the investors.

Over time, the attitudes of various stakeholders have shifted, the most important being that of the consumer. With ubiquity of smartphones, broadband penetration, consumer in general accept technological interventions in their lives more than before. Online shopping, banking, and education services, to name a few, permeate daily lives, and the consumers are not averse to trying digital platforms for their medical needs as well. Now a mature and sophisticated technology has put digital healthcare at an inflection point.

For mfine, an interesting case was of a farmer reaching out through a video call, while working in his field. “Even the doctor was surprised to see a patient connecting from a remote village. This suggests how India has been changing and how mobile internet has been delivering healthcare in the nook and corners of the country,” said Ashutosh Lawania, co-founder, mfine.

Investors too are evincing interest, realising that a huge unmet demand exists, with supply abysmally low. Sid Pai, founder of Siana Capital, feels it is the structural deficiencies in the healthcare space which has spurred participation from both these groups. “India has an extremely low doctor-to-patient ratio. So anything that increases the efficiency of this interaction – by way of automating follow-ups, remote consultations, medicines – has potential for growth.”

Apart from patients and healthcare providers, insurers have been keen to adopt technology. For distribution and marketing, actuarial analysis, policy administration, checking frauds, billing and claims management, technological innovations like advanced analytics, digital ledgers, machine learning hold tremendous promise for insurance companies.

The pharmaceutical industry, another powerful player, is itself getting transformed from increased digitisation: collecting data from sensors and apps, engaging with online communities, conducting clinical trials, monitoring drug performance. Digitisation of healthcare records is enabling new drug development and better targeted marketing for their products.

Within the overarching trifecta of prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, the startups usually enter into one stage of the value chain, using digital technology. A weakness of the Indian healthcare startups, however, has been the lack of a business model right from the inception stage. This has to be an integral part of product development process, while ascertaining product-market fit. Only a disruptive business model and not a disruptive innovation alone can earn revenues for sustainability. No wonder, only a few get past the proof of concept stage, even fewer beyond the prototype and the few survivors reach up to the minimum viable product stage.

Despite various hurdles, technology is making slow inroads into healthcare, owing to convergence of interests of various actors, led by startups. As long as the interests remained aligned, technology will only deepen the ingress.

Do you think technology has a major role to play in the Indian healthcare system? Why? Share your thoughts in the comments below.