A Place For Disruptive Technology In India’s Health Sector

Case Studies – Successful pilot projects

• Hospitals in China used 5G-powered temperature measurement devices at entrance to flag patients who have fever/fever-like symptoms.
• Robots measuring heart rates and blood oxygen levels through smart bracelets and rings that patients wear.
• In India, the Sawai Man Singh government hospital in Jaipur held trials with a humanoid robot to deliver medicines and food to COVID-19 patients.

Significance of disruptive technologies in healthcare

• Addressing the risk of frontline warriors: The medical community has been selfless but losing a number of staff in the process.
• Furthering Universal Health Coverage (UHC): Through the application of digital technologies, led by a robust strategy integrating human, financial, organisational and technological resources.
• Low costs: Helps hospitals provide the best facilities at less cost.
• Enhanced competition: Provide a level playing field for all sectors and foster competition.

Disruptive technologies and potential applications in healthcare

• Blockchain technology: Helping to address interoperability challenges through a complete indexed history of all medical data, including formal medical records and health data from mobile applications and wearable sensors.
  • It can be stored in a secure network and authenticated
• Big data analytics: To improve patient-based services - such as early disease detection.
• AI and the Internet of Medical Things, or IoMT: Defined as a connected infrastructure of medical devices, software applications, and health systems and services, can reshape healthcare applications.
• Cloud computing: To facilitating collaboration and data exchanges between doctors, departments, and even institutions and medical providers to enable the best treatment.

Challenges and concerns

• Fragmentation of information: Studies by WHO show that weakly-coordinated steps may lead to stand-alone ICT solutions, leading to a fragmentation of information and resulting in poor delivery of care.
• Other possible constraints: Standardisation of health data, organisational silos, data security and data privacy, and high investments.

Way forward

• India needs to own its digital health strategy: Emphasising on ethical appropriateness of digital technologies, cross digital divide, and ensure inclusion across the economy.
  • ‘Ayushman Bharat’ and ICT tools could be fine-tuned to promote ways to protect populations.
  • Online consultation through video conferencing should be a part of such a strategy.
• Using local knowledge:
  • Inculcate learnings from global experiences such as Ebola virus outbreak in Africa, where communities proactively helped curtail spread much before the government’s arrival.
  • Indonesia, where the experience of backyard poultry farmers was used to tackle bird flu.
  • Primary health centres in India could examine local/traditional knowledge and experience and then use it along with modern technology.
• Technological leap forward: Synchronisation and integration, developing a template for sharing data, and reengineering many of the institutional and structural arrangements in the medical sector.