The future of healthcare

Digital Health: Giving Birth to New Delivery Models and Fostering Innovations

Imagine a world where patient information is accurate, accessible, reliable, and safe. The opportunities and benefits are endless: availability, accuracy, portability and privacy of patient information, confidence on the information in an emergency, ease in searching and finding patterns, medical and post ops management with proactive reminders influencing patient behavior, and minimizing insurance and substance abuse. In recent times, we have seen tremendous progress in the evolution of cloud technology. Cloud enables easy access to shared configurable technology resources that can be utilized to rapidly create and deploy new services.

Followings are the some of the key challenges that remain to improve healthcare:
• Investment – Compared to the other countries, very small % of Indian GDP is spent on developing healthcare which is about 100 times less than the United States.
• Geography – A wide gap remains between rural and urban healthcare. Most of our healthcare resources are concentrated in big cities leaving the rural areas with no or almost no resources to meet the growing healthcare need.
• Infrastructure – The number of hospitals and health centers in India are far less than what is required. Except for a few super specialty hospitals, most of the hospitals and health centers in India do not have proper infrastructure to provide quality services.

It makes sense then that in India where there is always a huge gap between demand and availability of quality healthcare that cloud technology can play a huge role. Cloud based technology solutions can be leveraged to provide efficient and high-quality services in healthcare at an affordable price for remote locations with little to no infrastructure. With the advancement of technology, cloud is becoming more and more secured and compliant with regulations. Adopting cloud based technology solutions will all organizations engaged in healthcare to focus more on their core activities and reduce utilization of resources that manage technology.

Key research tells us that with digitization of medical data, medical knowledge has increased by 2 times or more in past 3 to 5 years. The way cloud is being adopted more and more by the industry globally and with the growing need for collaboration, flexibility and improved patient care, we can say that cloud will eventually become a commonplace in the industry.

As seen in countries that have developed healthcare systems, these capabilities were key in the development of healthcare to a point where no avenue is left unexplored in the strive towards improvement of healthcare for its citizens.

While the road to these advances may have been littered with challenges, impediments, false starts and hurdles, technologies today and the lessons learned therein will allow developing nations to avoid such pitfalls and leapfrog their healthcare eco-system into the future!

(Contributors: Kausik Bhattacharya, Johnson & Johnson, Sandipan Gangopadhyay, President and COO, Galaxe Solutions. Dheeraj Misra and Anusha Panduga also from Galaxe Solutions.)

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