Shahid Akhter, editor, ETHealthworld, spoke to Mohan P, CEO, Medexpert Software Solutions, to know more about the emerging role of AI and data in aiding intelligent decision making in real-time patient monitoring.
How are modern technologies transforming healthcare delivery in India?
The pace of technology adoption in India coupled with technology convergence in healthcare is ensuing a huge transformation in the way healthcare is delivered in our country. As India gears up for more widespread adoption of connected devices and artificial intelligence (AI) on the Edge, this transformation is bound to accelerate further. The pandemic has also made the Government as well as the medical fraternity realize the importance of preparedness and the availability of necessary healthcare infrastructure to provide contactless patient care.
From a healthcare provider’s perspective, with more than 60 percent of India’s population having access to a smartphone, providing mHealth and Tele-Health services have become necessary. The need to deliver quality healthcare via multiple channels is driving increased technology adoption across the healthcare ecosystem. In the near future, IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) and mHealth will enable greater access to quality medical care across India, driven in part by the widespread availability of 4G (and soon 5G), enabling big data on cloud.
Another important factor is the greater level of awareness among citizens for practicing healthy lifestyles and improving their overall wellness quotient, which is compelling healthcare providers to strengthen their digital infrastructure.
What impact do you think new-age health-tech companies have made in our country?
New-age healthtech companies are instrumental in driving down the cost of care, while improving the overall quality of care in India, given the disproportionate ratio of availability of Doctors and Nurses vis-a-vis our massive population. With just 8.57 doctors per 10,000 people (per a WHO report), new-age health tech companies are helping narrow this gap through technology advancements. A good example is the acute shortage of intensivists (ICU doctors). With a vast majority of our population in rural India and most of the intensivists operating in metros, rural hospitals have turned to secure mobile apps and platforms to connect with intensivists.
How are healthcare delivery organizations, such as clinics and hospitals, fast-tracking their digital journeys?
Digitization of health records is one of the key focus areas in our country, driven by updated policies and regulations. This combined with high availability digital infrastructure, underpinned by a strong cloud foundation, is helping drive down the costs of digitization across healthcare delivery organizations. Cloud economics and advanced security offered by second generation cloud infrastructure providers like Oracle, while strictly adhering to all the regulatory compliances, are enabling healthtech companies to extend the same quantum of high quality services even to small & medium hospitals/clinics, which earlier was perhaps more directed towards the bigger hospitals. With faster and wider adoption of healthcare cloud services in rural areas of our country, cloud based EMRs, HMS and Patient Care providers are enabling hospitals and clinics to accelerate their digital journey by providing them affordable data capture and decision support systems. Hospitals and clinics now see the value of Patient Engagement and are realizing the benefits of creating superior patient experiences.
How are you helping hospitals and clinics get more data-driven? How has your strategic partnership with Oracle Cloud helped in this regard?
New-age, digital-savvy doctors are constantly looking for ways to get clinical and operational information at their fingertips for better diagnosis and treatment. This is leading to hospitals and clinics becoming more data sensitive. Clinical Decision Support systems and AI enabled predictive algorithms are making the lives of our overworked doctors easy. AgileHealth cloud solutions made available through OCI makes it easier for hospitals and clinics to have complete visibility into both Clinical and Operational data from anywhere. Today we are able to host over 20 million patient records accessed by over 4000 doctors on our cloud platform at ease and still guarantee all of them an availability of 99.95 percent. Buoyed by our strategic partnership with Oracle, we have strengthened our capabilities and are now in a position to digitize hospitals of 150 beds in less than 10 days and make them paperless.
Through our cloud-based AgileHealth services running on OCI, we are helping healthcare delivery organizations realize lowest possible Total Cost of Ownership for HMS and EMR, and everyone is benefiting from the superior cloud economics.
What’s your health-tech innovation roadmap looking like?
We are pivoting our HMS to enable customers to ‘Uberize’ their services. We are now focused on enabling access to real-time patient data for hospitals. With over 95,000 ICU beds in India, real-time data capture from patient monitors, ventilators and other critical care devices provides the ability to monitor care anytime anywhere – aiding intelligent decision making, using AI and big data. We are currently engaged in facilitating this critical data capture through our medical device agnostic protocol. Next, we are focusing on AI on the Edge devices, we believe these will play a key role in early prediction of medical conditions of critic al care patients. Our goal eventually is to drive the convergence of all these services into our real-time patient monitoring platform.
