On the windy streets of Copenhagen, children, young adults, and older people are all on bikes, with parents and their children on cargo bikes (a quarter of families in Copenhagen own one). It may look as though Copenhageners crave the outdoors, get a kick out of exercise, want to be fit and healthy. It may or may not be the reason. Maybe, it’s just the easiest way to get anywhere.

Admiring all this and more, we at InnovatioCuris, attended the 24th Annual International partnering conference BIO-Europe 2018. BIO-Europe, scheduled for 5th – 7th November 2018 in Copenhagen, Denmark, a pre-eminent conference for the life sciences, is Europe’s largest partnering conference that serves the global biotechnology industry. It brought together the thought leaders and international decisionmakers from the whole healthcare sector including biotechnology, pharmaceutical, investors and policymakers, offering networking opportunities, workshops & panel discussions, high profile exhibition and B2B meetings. It provided an excellent networking platform for strategic partnerships.

InnovatioCuris supported the event as a media sponsor with focus on networking through B2B meetings and exhibition, along with the aim of strengthening its ecosystem with innovative partners in order to bring down the healthcare delivery cost and improve the quality of care.

It was an exceptional experience coupled with reinforcing existing partnerships and scouting new stakeholders / global experts in the healthcare space.

We came back home with warm memories and new friends. We look forward to creating an impact together by fostering innovations in the health sector.

Parthvee Jain is an engineering graduate with specialization and interests in fields like Biotechnology, Healthcare, Food Processing, and Nutraceuticals. Connecting European Healthcare innovation leaders with the Indian healthcare system and pioneers, she heads the market access program and partnerships at InnovatioCuris: impacting organizational performance through expert research, analysis and evaluating market competitive conditions, current and emerging trends, and industry-specific solutions.

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.)

Want to write for InnoHEALTH? send us your article at magazine@innovatiocuris.com

Innovations will remain the spine of modern health and medical facilities, but regulations, standardization will be the need of the hour as India strides towards improving health standards with innovations and innovative approach.

Initiating discussion on this topical subject, Sandipan Gangopadhyay of GalaxE from the US said, “E-Health is the need of the time and you need quality data to implement it. Collating data in a country with 1.3 billion people should not be a concern, but it’s a challenge. Once you gather data, the challenge shifts towards protection of data, exploitation of data and mismanagement of data. These are common challenges all over the world and will be faced in India more so due its complex demographics.”

Extending his keynote address on the subject, he added, “As we learn about solutions adopted in different countries, India should take advantage of that and adapt those solutions to avoid mistakes and complications associated with handling large data. Adhaar, the hottest thing in India, seems to be the most suitable solution for various things, including health and medical facilities.

“Simply identifying standardization isn’t the solution for enhancing the health and medical industry, but implementation of the same, with international partnership at the government and private/public sector will definitely induce transparency and invite every player to join hands and work together towards a healthy society.”

His inquisitive approach uncovered some very relevant and important notions on the subject. Kausik Bhattacharya from Johnson & Johnson highlighted the technological advantage at the corporate level as he spelled out the dependence on Cloud Technology. Explaining the term he said that “Cloud technology may not be new, but its disrupting the way things are happening or will happen in future in the field of health and medical facilities.”

Elaborating on the subject, he added that Cloud is giving rise to a completely new set of delivery models, which are trying to make it more agile or faster in terms of converting ideas into a product of service that will ultimately help the doctors, nurses and also the patients. The biggest advantage of cloud technology is its potential to implement scalability. Cloud technology can also help in connecting different technologies and evolve into complete solutions.

Marilia Cavaco, also from John & Johnson, highlighted other aspects of J&J that makes them one of the global leaders in the health sector.

“At Johnson & Johnson we touch over a billion lives on a daily basis with our products, medications and services. Since we touch so many lives it’s imperative for us to maintain safety and hygiene as the top concern in our operations. That being our ground standard, we have made investments into artificial intelligence and machine learning and have been getting very encouraging support from our partners at FDA in the US,“ said Ms. Cavaco.

Mr. Misra, asked some penetrating questions of Dr. Dayaprasad G Kulkarni regarding the ever-important subject of transparency. In response, Dr. Kulkarni said, “The current efforts of the government to digitalize India and services in India are contributing to inducing transparency and also democraticize and cut down on the seepage of sources, which is a huge problem in both private and public sectors. Next step is for us to engage in these facilities and platforms and take advantage of this transparency.”

“WHO’s Global Digital Health Index is another good tool to bring transparency at international level and will provide a standard platform of digitization. This is an index that looks at tracking, monitoring, evaluating and scoring the use of digital technology that will help bring all the players at one unified level.”

On the home front, Dr. Rahil Qamar Siddiqui, Founder of Eventus, brought to everyone’s attention that standardization is available in the country and how it’s helping to spell out the health policy and also keep the industry under control.

“There are EHR standards in India; it’s unfortunate though that not many in the industry know about it. In addition to the Bureau of Indian Standards the ministry is also involved in setting a lot of standards in India. Ministry of Health Holding (MOHH) has in fact published a document spelling out HER standards for India,” clarified Dr. Siddiqui.

“So there’s a standard for vendors to apply for even though there’s no accreditation body – yet. In fact, there are standards in various fields and segments of health sector that Government of India has compiled, to be used within India and opportunities like this (InnoHEALTH) help us to educate the public at large,” concluded Dr. Siddiqui.

Want to write for InnoHEALTH? send us your article at  magazine@innovatiocuris.com

Read all the issues of InnoHEALTH magazine:
InnoHEALTH Volume 1 Issue 1 (July to September 2016) – https://goo.gl/iWAwN2 
InnoHEALTH Volume 1 Issue 2 (October to December 2016) – https://goo.gl/4GGMJz 
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 1 (January to March 2017) – https://goo.gl/DEyKnw 
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 2 (April to June 2017) – https://goo.gl/Nv3eev
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 3 (July to September 2017) – https://goo.gl/MCVjd6
InnoHEALTH Volume 2 Issue 4 (October to December 2017) – http://amzn.to/2B2UMLw
InnoHEALTH Volume 3 Issue 1 (January to March 2018) – https://goo.gl/fksdQx

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