The technology shift has cast itself over the field of healthcare, bringing with it a digital transformation in the way doctors and patients interact. Rapidly transforming medical technology and the availability of technology diagnostic and therapeutic equipment together with changing practice pattern of doctors has revolutionized the way health care is being delivered today. It is even more helpful in a country where nearly 70 per cent of the population lives in rural communities, e-health initiatives would change the game for our healthcare sector and the one billion it serves.

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Impact of digitalization on Healthcare:

• Telemedicine has fast become the mainstay of health technology deployment for the delivery of services
• Disease surveillance and management, maternal and infant education, awareness on prevention of NCDs and vector-borne diseases can all be enabled through SMS-based communications, videos and messaging services for the rural population.
• Mobile phone applications offering aggregator services for medical professionals, delivery of medicines and availability of diagnostic and test reports are set to enhance efficiency of services and also ensure faster access to medical treatment
• The digitisation of medical records can be enabled by providing cloud-based storage for key health documents with patient profiles.
• Electronic medical record systems such as HealthConnect in Australia, SPINE in England, AORTA in the Netherlands, EMRX in Singapore and others have had a profound impact on the quality and continuity of care.
• Healthcare industry is one of the fields where you can use big data to its maximum potential. Big data analysis has evolved to be a major boon, both for managing the health of the patient and for the business angle of the healthcare organizations.
• With virtual reality, it is possible to understand the organs and their positioning in alarming clarity and in three-dimensional terms. This is known as 3D bioprinting.
• Wearable technology and internet of things has revolutionized the monitoring of health parameters.
• Most importantly the core processes within the institutions become automated, making early detection and quick diagnosis, proving it to be quite impactful

Benefits:

• Reducing Medical Errors: It provides a vehicle for improving quality and safety of patient care by reducing medication and medical errors.
• Patient Involvement: It stimulates consumer education and patients’ involvement in their own health care.
• Increases efficiency: by eliminating unnecessary paperwork and provides caregivers with clinical decision support tools for more effective care and treatment
• Improves public health reporting and monitoring: by creating a potential loop for feedback between health-related research and actual practice. Further, it provides a basic level of interoperability among electronic health records (EHRs) maintained by individual physicians and organizations.
• Technology in Healthcare: It facilitates efficient deployment of emerging technology and health care services and provides the backbone of technical infrastructure for leverage by national and State level initiatives

Challenges posed to adoption of digitalization:

• Digital transformation places significant demands on the digital infrastructure. Lack of internet connectivity put patients’ life at risk.
• Connectivity lapses in various regions affecting the poor more
• Affordability of hi-tech solutions will pose a challenge to poorer sections of society.
• The increasing adoption of cloud technologies, and explosive growth in the number of connected devices and data fuelled by digital health will bring significant strain and complexity to legacy IT systems. This could threaten performance and the user experience.
• Possible risk of hacking of some medical devices or databases which could leak the private information of patients leading to violation of right to privacy.
• In some cases, digital health initiatives will fail to take off altogether.
• There is a huge supply-demand gap in health infrastructure and human resourcing for the sector. With 80 per cent of doctors, 75 per cent of dispensaries and 60 per cent of hospitals in urban areas, there exists a great distortion in the distribution of health infrastructure.

Way forward:

• Stable source and supply of electricity and internet services in every rural area, so as to facilitate IT innovations applied.
• The government must encourage application development in the health sector with a fund set aside to encourage young entrepreneurs in this field.
• The government’s scheme should help extend credit to health technology entrepreneurs.
• Strengthening the telemedicine sector, by hiring more efficient staff and tele callers, so as to meet the vast rural population

Conclusion:

Though the healthcare sector has traditionally seen lower levels of IT investment and adoption, the trend is fast changing. Currently, the industry is in the phase shedding away its initial reluctance towards technology and exploring the impact of various technologies. While many programs have either been rolled out, or envisaged in parts of India, the implementation, almost always, has been partial or incomplete, but is expected to improve over the coming years.