Health is the Motive and Digital is the Instrument
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© Indian Institute of Science 2020.
Health is the Motive and Digital is the Instrument
S. Seethalakshmi* and Rahul Nandan Abstract | The coronavirus crisis has seen an unprecedented response from India and the world. If the viral outbreak has exposed gross inadequacies in the healthcare systems of nations both rich and poor, it has stirred a digital healthcare revolution that has been building since the past decade. We have seen how this new era of digital health evolved over the years since healthcare started getting increasingly unaffordable in the western countries forcing a relook in their strategies to explosion of digital innovations in mobile telephony and applications, internet, wearable devices, artificial intelligence, robotics, big data and genomics. The single biggest trigger for the digital shift has indeed been the COVID-19 pandemic this year, more so in India with astonishing response from the private enterprise and the proactive push from the government so evident. However, the full potential of this digital revolution cannot be realized as long as core structural reforms in public healthcare do not take place along with significant boost in digital infrastructure. The way digital technologies have helped facilitate strategy and response to the global pandemic and with predictions of more zoonotic outbreaks impending in the coming years, it has become imperative for the world to increasingly adopt and integrate digital innovations to make healthcare more accessible, interconnected and affordable.
Healthcare is realigning in response to COVID19 like never before. The health ecosystem across the world and particularly in India is witnessing a paradigm digital shift to ensure accessibility, affordability and quality care at a time when the viral outbreak has exposed the chronic state of our country’s under-funded and ill prepared healthcare infrastructure. Though COVID-19 pandemic has heralded a new era of digital healthcare across nations, rich and poor, the digital health storm has been brewing over the past decade owing to a host of factors, both welcoming and worrying. First, the extremely high cost of healthcare in many developed economies, particularly in the US, coupled with low health outcomes have led them to increasingly invest more on digitization of service and delivery models. A last year’s poll
J. Indian Inst. Sci. | VOL xxx:x | xxx–xxx 2020 | journal.iisc.ernet.in
by Gallup—a global analytics firm—had 25% of Americans say that they or their family member had delayed treatment for a serious condition owing to the high costs of care1. Several European nations figure among the most expensive countries for hospitalization in the world—Monaco, Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Austria2. Realizing that adopting digital technologies is key to overcome these challenges and strengthen health systems, these countries started spending considerably on developing digital health innovations in the areas of telemedicine,
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