Digitalisation of healthcare can significantly impact healthcare delivery in India and in enabling value-based care. It can help transcend the barrier between hospitals and patients and improve in healthcare access with a profound impact in moving beyond Metros & cities to the interior towns and rural India. Notwithstanding the pandemic, the emergence of lifestyle diseases and additional factors of income, insurance and awareness for health creates a significant stress on the inadequate infrastructure of healthcare providers to offer cost effective, equitable, accessible, and quality care. This is where Digitalisation of Healthcare can and will be a revolution.

Telemedicine has been the forerunner of the digital part for a long time and has significantly evolved during the current pandemic. It helps in improving access and cost optimisation specially for rural India. The National Digital Health Mission’s (NDHM) attempt to come up with a Health ID akin to Aaadhar is to digitize the patient’s healthcare information as EMR and be accessible across platforms to all providers which aids in prognosis in a quicker time and optimise cost. The Data privacy is an open issue being dealt with to offset security concerns. Adoption of Artificial Intelligence can help in refining clinical outcomes, address infrastructure issue of human resource amongst caregivers by automating processes and tasks. The OR has begun to witness the adoption of robotics be it in sensing and imaging, surgical access and wound closure and reduce the risk of infections and revision surgeries. The consumerism of healthcare through smart wearables and connectivity is providing real time data which helps in quick diagnosis and intervention and improve patient outcomes. AR and VR have helped industry to significantly improve customer experiences and understand new technology but also in democratizing skill training and engagement and experience. The sheer ability to blend real world elements with virtual helps in prototypes and shorten the innovation value chain from the clinical lab to commercialization.

`The biggest issue confronting Rural India is ‘accessibility’ arising out of the infrastructure gap of providers, which adds to cost and time but also delays the prognosis and timely intervention. The pandemic dispelled many myths and has provided the impetus to shift care from hospital to home (can be accelerated with a reform in health insurance reimbursement conditions) and teleconsultation has evolved to setting up remote ICU management which on one hand addresses the shortage of specialized staff but also aids in quicker critical care access. However, one also needs to bear in mind that virtual consultation alone will not be sufficient and there must be an infrastructure push to improve OPD access and physical consultation as well in the initial days; primarily also because the IoMT cannot be leveraged fully since there are connectivity limitations in these places. Hence a ‘phygital approach is the need and ask to leverage the digitalisation of healthcare in rural India. The internet revolution in India is no longer confined to urban areas and this is another quick win where mobile health apps can help in better patient engagement and treatment compliance, minimize the risk of AMR as well as provide health education and expert knowhow to caregivers.

Novel technologies by way of application of VR, Genomics etc. are still first to be evaluated in the urban context before being applicable in the rural context. In my view, the priority should be first towards leveraging the power of digital health in improving accessibility and avoid redundancy in multiple costs because of a fragmented care approach access to patient clinical documentation to start with, before reaping other benefits that this can set off for Rural India and improve the overall healthcare delivery and optimise costs.