It’s hard to find a silver lining in the dark cloud that hovered over India (and the world) in the form of the pandemic. But the healthcare industry’s increased adoption of technology is one of them. Technology is helping to re-imagine healthcare in India by helping to look at it holistically, by combining both the preventive and curative aspects of healthcare. Traditionally healthcare in India has been focused on sick care and there have been challenges in terms of a low doctor-citizen ratio and an inequitable distribution of hospitals and clinics across cities, towns and villages. Very little has been done in developing preventive healthcare services, which technology is now enabling, apart from making sick care more efficient.
The most common manifestation of technology adoption was in the form of telemedicine. Doctors started conversing with patients on video calls via WhatsApp or collaboration tools like Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, to name a few. Testing and diagnostics also leveraged technology for booking tests that could be scheduled for home. Chats with medical advisors on test results or remote doctor consultations once the results came through were also seen during this phase. With the proliferation of WhatsApp across India, these services started going online in rural areas as well.
Remote patient monitoring also picked up in this phase with rapid adoption of wearable technology. Vitals like pulse rate, sleep quality, and in some cases even a ECG are now possible using wearable devices like watches and health patches made by brands like Ultra Human for example. Health app usage started going up, to monitor vitals and activity parameters and sleep parameters.
A rapid transformation is also underway in corporate healthcare. Companies like Loop provided thousands of hours of doctor consultations and medical advisor chats to lakhs of employees and their families across India. This helped in dealing not only with COVID-related issues but also mental health issues, lifestyle diseases and other categories of conditions. With Loop’s insuretech capabilities, companies onboarded new employees and their families onto insurance plans seamlessly and help them with their claims and also hospitalization discharge experiences. All this is done through technology and has worked across India.
(The author is Mr. Amrit Singh, Co-founder and CRO, Loop and the views expressed in this article are his own)
