Chairman of the Academy of Digital Health Sciences and the Commonwealth AI Consortium for Capacity Building
In today’s fast-evolving healthcare landscape, embracing Digital Health isn’t optional for doctors—it’s essential. Those who resist these advancements risk becoming obsolete.
Digital Health has existed for decades, but Covid-19 proved that integration of digital health is vital for addressing the critical issues of access, affordability, and quality. During an international conference in Dubai in January 2020, a leading hospital CEO told me after my talk on Digital Health, “I have invested millions of dollars in hospitals not to do telemedicine, but to have patients come to my hospital.”
In three months, Covid-19 struck, and hospitals without telemedicine capabilities found themselves struggling to deliver care. If we peep into history, way back in 2012, Kaiser Permanente – a leading healthcare provider in the US – their digital consultations exceeded in-person visits. These examples demonstrate that digital health works and this decade has seen more advancements in digital medicine than in the past century.
For all healthcare problems, we have digital interventions; one cannot ignore them if one is a clinician or an HCP. Right from using digital consultations in rural areas, artificial intelligence in acute conditions to digital therapeutics in chronic conditions to robotics in surgery–it is proven that digital interventions deliver better care, leading to improved outcomes at lesser costs and, most importantly, save clinicians valuable time besides enhancing patient satisfaction and trust. For every medical challenge, we have digital solutions, and artificial intelligence has disrupted the sector. I have outlined the vision for the future of medicine as follows:
Doctors will move beyond the stethoscope Hospitals will move beyond the beds
Pharmaceuticals will move beyond selling pills to therapy MedTech Will move beyond hardware to software Patients will move from episodic care to pre-emptive & holistic care Treatment will move from generalised to personalised & precision medicine Payers will move from ‘cost’ to ‘value’ Healthcare delivery will move from four walls to five fingers Finally, We will move from healthcare to health
It’s crucial for healthcare providers to understand the need to leverage technology across the entire healthcare value chain. The potential benefits of digital health are immense, and it’s time for providers to embrace these technologies.
Medicine is grappling with perennial issues of providing the correct diagnosis to the right medicine as clinical knowledge is increasing in leaps and bounds with new scientific research at a breakneck pace. The clinicians are human beings, and we cannot expect them to keep pace by reading all that is happening, and AI can be a great tool to use.
Similarly, a chronic disease patient cannot visit a doctor every time there is a spike in readings; this can be handled by digital tools leaving the most critical decisions to doctors rather than addressing routine spikes that cause anxiety to patients which can be handled by DTx; and VR and AR can help patients and doctors in complex situations and robotics can lead to surgeons delivering precision surgeries.
The Indian government has taken the lead and set a record by delivering almost 700 million ABHA IDs and over 300 digital consultations through e-Sanjeevani. The government has rolled out insurance coverage for over 600 million people. India’s healthcare is going digital rapidly, and providers must embrace this change.
Our studies show that while six in 10 patients are familiar with digital health, only two in ten doctors are. Today, patients are aware of the technology available for their medical condition. If doctors don’t keep up, they risk losing patients who expect technologically adept care providers. Technology upskilling for clinicians is critical and will drive the next level of change. The time to adopt digital health is now.
Dr Rajendra Pratap Gupta