India-specific healthcare needs can be met with innovation on both the digital and policy fronts. Technology and innovation can not only help us uncover potential disease trends but also treat the unmet needs of a patient. Simultaneously, in this era of personalised medicine, India can envision a future in the global healthcare industry by ensuring collaboration between academia and pharma companies to fuel state-of-the-art innovation. Bringing modernity to medicine can thus streamline clinical processes, optimise approaches, and help map out future trends. Employing advanced diagnostics can also reduce the long-term burden of diseases.

Collecting and analysing real-time patient data and integrating it with a centralised database can identify interventions related to unmet basic needs, map disease prognosis in an efficient manner and lower overall healthcare costs for the population. If leveraged appropriately, they can play a critical role in reducing patient load, solving the problem of human capital, and addressing any gaps in the system or global health challenges especially to manage chronic disease.ĭigital transformation in healthcare can also play a significant role in disease surveillance and make it more proactive. Since the pandemic, telehealth and digital health have come to the fore. Innovation for alleviating the healthcare burden Other incentives such as income tax rebates or financial stimuli that support regular screening programs can also be initiated.

Along with traditional channels, social media campaigns can play an important role in encouraging people to adopt healthier lifestyles. Under circumstances of poor resource availability, incorporating out-of-the-box solutions to move patients from post-symptomatic treatment to pre-symptomatic screening is the need of the hour. Though stakeholders and systems are beginning to tackle some of these needs with the help of awareness campaigns and preventive screenings, there is a pressing need for resources and allied services to be drastically scaled up.

India needs an additional 3 million beds, nearly 4 million healthcare professionals (HCPs) and enhanced investments across the country's length and breadth to meet its burgeoning healthcare needs. Redressal of these current patient care challenges is essential to match the global health curriculum. The recent initiatives of the government to address this middle income segment of the population through and expansion of the Ayushman Bharat – PMJAY scheme is very much welcome.

This is compounded by increasing healthcare costs and an ageing population. Though certain populations are covered by public health schemes like Ayushman Bharat–Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (ABPM-JAY) and central government health schemes, the middle-class continues to bear the brunt of the economic impact. In our country, where insurance coverage is still at a nascent stage, ensuring universal health coverage can be one way to tackle disparity. Unmet medical needs can come up due to financial insecurity, socio-economic disparity, or inequitable treatment for patients across different strata. Revamping healthcare to become patient-centricĭespite advances in the field of health and medicine, poor outcomes arising from delayed diagnosis of the disease are very common in India.

Strata oncology