Humans as a race have to go digital

Conversation with Dr. Preetha Reddy (Apollo Hospitals)

My last business trip before the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded was to Chennai in January 2020. I had an opportunity to visit the Apollo Hospitals Group during that trip – Asia’s foremost integrated healthcare provider. That was really my last international business trip. Then I went back to China and have not really left since then.

Dr. Preetha Reddy is the vice chairperson of Apollo Hospitals. She has been recognized in many ways. She is someone who is very outspoken and is spending time contributing to the dialogue about: where healthcare is heading, what it takes to build health care delivery in a country like India, and how to addresses the many challenges which are already along the way. I set up a call with her to find out more. Here is our first conversation out of the three which I will be sharing in the next weeks.

Elisabeth Staudinger:

Dr. Preetha, what is the impact of the pandemic on Indian - or also global - healthcare and how do you see it panning out?

Dr. Preetha Reddy:

COVID-19 has been relentless in its challenge to global healthcare and has led to unprecedented damage in its wake. Currently, India is grappling with a second surge of the pandemic which has greater infectivity, oxygen is scarce, beds are in short supply and the frontline is stretched. 

As with every crisis, both the good and the bad have come into sharp focus. The pandemic has underlined how woefully short we are in terms of healthcare facilities for a land with a billion plus people. It reiterates that we need to invest a lot more into healthcare in the immediate and longer term as well.

Digital is massively empowering in the quest to deliver healthcare for all!

The silver lining is that as an immediate aftermath of the COVID crisis, our budgetary allocation on building healthcare has increased manifold. The right steps to self-reliance in healthcare have begun and are promising. The nation’s rapid adoption of telemedicine and digital health is also very promising. While the pandemic has been the catalyst, I am confident that our digital health backbone will continue to grow more robust, even after we surmount the pandemic. This augurs well for Indian and global health, because digital is massively empowering in the quest to deliver healthcare for all!

The pandemic has taught us resilience and going ahead we must weave this critical learning when we build healthcare systems for the future. When healthcare is a priority, good health always follows!

Elisabeth Staudinger:

Dr. Preetha, if you think about healthcare in 10 years, 15 years from now, in what way will it be different? What are the things you see will change and will evolve?

Dr. Preetha Reddy:

There are two aspects to it. One, of course, is the business aspect. The second is the caring aspect, which to me is the most important. We are in the business of caring. If you look at just Indian data, it's a 372 billion USD healthcare market. At the same time, we are a population of 1.3 billion. Are we really going to give access to everyone? I'm going to say hopefully. We need to work at it. We need to have policies to drive it. We need to do multiple steps to really achieve it. The government and the private sector have to work in tandem. From a global perspective, the developed countries have some form of access or the other. What we are still grappling with, and the COVID-19 pandemic showed it so clearly, is that we just don't have adequate infrastructure and adequate manpower. So how do we overcome the challenge? I think humans as a race have to go digital. Digital will become the backbone and the support system for the way health care is being delivered. A large amount of people are still moving from one space to another, from their homes to healthcare facilities - that will change. With technology, the point of care will shift to where people are.

Humans as a race have to go digital. Digital will become the backbone and the support system for the way health care is being delivered.

Elisabeth Staudinger:

Absolutely. Digital solutions will enable healthcare providers to deliver higher value care and tackle the challenge of providing access to care – the lack of manpower became painfully obvious during the pandemic. In that regard, what kind of shift are you seeing in the digital space since the pandemic unfolded?

Dr. Preetha Reddy:

There was a recent survey from EY and the Imperial College London Institute for Global Health Innovation. India is among the highest adopters of digital technology during the pandemic. India has leapfrogged into adopting and adapting to new ways of doing things. So, if India can do it so quickly, so fast, the rest of the world can, too. 51% of respondents in India have increased the use of digital technology and data solutions since the COVID-19 outbreak. The telemedicine market was predicted to reach USD 32 million by 2020. Now, it's expected to cross USD 5.5 billion by 2025. So that's the shift we are seeing. Digital is here. Digital has come to stay and digital would throw a lot of brick and mortar physical plans out of gear. When I spoke about the challenge of infrastructure and the challenge of personnel, digital will answer to a large extent and take away some of the load. And I think that is the future.

 In the second part of our conversation, Dr. Preetha Reddy and I will further deep dive into “digital” which almost seems like a magical solution for leapfrogging. Stay tuned.