Accelerating Digital Transformation In Healthcare: Strategies. Practices For Post-COVID World

The Coronavirus pandemic has revolutionised our lacklustre attitude towards using digital technologies to facilitate healthcare. In the pre-pandemic days, both patients and doctors were apprehensive about resorting to digital diagnostics services. 

With everyone now having access to smartphones, the internet, and the need to reduce physical commutes as a result of the pandemic, the use of telemedicine has skyrocketed. With all the players in the vast digital healthcare ecosystem focusing on digital transformation, the focus has now shifted to providing patients with more flexible and personalised access to healthcare.   

In a recently concluded roundtable organised by BW Businessworld with some of India’s top leaders associated with the world of digital healthcare, a wide range of topics were discussed, including the impact of the pandemic on the healthcare system, remote healthcare, scaling up of digital infrastructure, data security, and the importance of the cloud in propelling the digital healthcare revolution. 

Pandemic has accelerated digital transformation: 

The pandemic led to the adoption of digital technology in healthcare at a breakneck pace. 

Smriti Joshi, Lead Psychologist & Member Board of Directors at Wysa said, "The healthcare industry has been successful in showing resilience and meeting the challenges that have been brought by the pandemic." 

Joshi underlined how people were initially hesitant about adopting digital technology in the domain of mental health.  

She said, "Mental health sessions were mostly preferred in person, especially in the Indian scenario, as it was tough for people to adopt a therapy session happening via text or video. However, people quickly realised the need to move to a digital platform to fulfil their needs." 

There was a rapid growth in the digital user base across healthcare platforms. As Joshi commented, "We at Wysa saw an increase of almost 77 per cent in our user base in 2020. There was the challenge of rapidly scaling-up, on-boarding more providers, and training them to deliver services in an ethically and legally safe manner." 

“Wysa aims to be a global leader in providing clinically proven programs, starting with our pilot with the NHS offering Wysa as a platform for e triage and waitlist management,” she added. 

Joshi also pointed out the need to update telehealth laws. She said, "Privacy laws need to be updated with regards to all the data which is being generated through the digital healthcare platforms."  

Joshi mentioned that in 2022 there will be several challenges the digital healthcare industry will have to work on. She said, "The next year will be more about bridging the gaps, updating the laws, providing training to clients and healthcare providers more efficiently,"  

Shyam Kalavalapalli, Founder at IDEA Clinics said, "Due to the pandemic, for the first time in history, all stakeholders got aligned – the patients, doctors, and the investors." 

Kalavalapalli said that the stakeholders were not interested in the digital healthcare platforms in the pre-pandemic period.   

He said, "Before the pandemic, when we started the IDEA Clinics, it was a brick and mortar model, as doctors were not interested in using digital platforms, we had to hire staff to feed data."  

Kalavalapalli highlighted that healthcare systems in cities behaved like islands when faced with a healthcare-related issue in the pre-pandemic period. He commented, "Every city behaved as if they were different countries, this thinking has now completely changed." 

The energetic founder sounded optimistic about India’s future in the healthcare sector. He said, "The way things are now looking, just with a little bit of boldness from India’s younger generation; we could end up as a global player in the healthcare domain." 

Kalavalapalli reasoned, "The western world’s healthcare system is stretched, they are unable to keep up, and are heavily reliant on people from India and other third-world countries,"  

"With new technology and a boom of start-ups, the Indian healthcare sector is well poised to become one of the frontline healthcare providers in the world, and that day is not far away. Most probably we will reach there by the end of the decade."   

Scaling-up during the pre-pandemic days was a challenge: 

Manish Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of wellOwise, stated that the pandemic forced them to reconsider how they operate and how they can contribute more. 

Kumar said, “At wellOwise, our primary focus has been on prediction, prevention and personalised care of chronic diseases. The pandemic highlighted the importance of preventing chronic diseases for better immune responses against infectious diseases. Covid disrupted the whole care regime for people who were either at high risk of chronic diseases or were already affected by it,”
 
He underlined, “There was a need for us to pause, and explore opportunities that would ensure a seamless continuation of our offerings, even in a world where physical contact didn’t exist. We realised that we could make an even greater impact by delivering precision insights via digital health tools,” 

"During the pandemic, we managed to launch several initiatives that not only ensured service continuity for our users but also expanded offerings to meet the demands of changing dynamics. Our tech team did a fantastic job, and having the entire infrastructure on the cloud helped too, as we were able to scale up swiftly. The challenge for us was more about finding a balancing act between long term vision and short-term needs so that we can have a bigger impact on the health outcomes of the people," he added. 

Mahesh Nagaraj, CEO & Co-Founder at IHX lauded the ability of healthcare platforms to scale up. Nagaraj said, “We witnessed significant demand on our application and the underlying infrastructure to scale-up to deal with the new rush. For example, one of our platform solutions saw a 78 per cent increase in the health claims volume." 

“Managing and handling the scale and scope of this rapid increase in health claims volume, and ability to re-design elements of application and infrastructure to deal with this surge in a short period of time was of paramount importance," he added. 

Worked on a war footing when the first wave kicked in: 

Mukesh Bansal, Co-Founder at Phable said, "There were several features we thought were irrelevant suddenly became much relevant, for example - We did not have a telecommunication model, but as the first wave kicked in we had to work on a war footing with our engineering team and product teams to get it delivered." 

With the onset of the pandemic, everything quickly went digital as there was not much choice. Bansal commented, "In the pre-pandemic period, doctors were happy writing prescriptions on paper but were not ready to write e-prescription modules. As soon as the pandemic kicked in, everyone wanted an EHR (Electronic Health Records) module to be in place." 

Bansal pointed out the challenges of remote care. He said, "The consultation with doctors can take place over the phone, on video, or in-person, but what happens when the patient is back home, whether he follows the treatment plan or not. This is the bridge we are trying to build, and for that to take place, a lot of device integration is required."   

Bansal highlighted that integration was a major challenge. He commented, "A major challenge was integrating with e-pharmacy players, diagnostic labs, devices. People were more comfortable in ordering medicines or getting tests done at home than going out." 

"These services though available were non-existent for regular customers, but by the time the second wave kicked in, we were well poised as we had adopted the digital ecosystem." 

Cloud is much more cost-effective: 

Ankit Sinha, Vice President – Cloud Practices & Consulting at SEARCE suggested that capital expenditure ends up soaking up a lot of investment and under-delivers in the end.  

Sinha underlined, "People began to use SaaS because they do not have the time to do CapEx investments to set up the plumbing, and spend more money to fix-up the previous plumbing, and then it ends up delivering poorly to the user."

"We witnessed the consumerisation of technology in which business owners with just a few knobs can use the cloud to deliver products and experiences which the industry needed," he added.  

The usage of the cloud grew up by leaps and bounds during the pandemic. Sinha commented, "In June 2020, most cloud service providers had not much capacity left as the demand was high, digital transformation indeed got completed during the pandemic." 

Sinha also highlighted two major challenges which they faced including costs of delivering services and conducting deep research projects.  

He commented, "The efficient delivery of services and the ability to exploit the data methodologically and come up with new insights, latest technology needs to be harnessed efficiently and that is where cloud has been a great enabler," 

Comfort level in terms of data security: 

Ankit Sinha said that there are three pillars about which he is concerned regarding cloud computing – security, privacy, and compliance.   

Sinha said, "As far as the security aspect is concerned, it is a shared responsibility model. Both cloud providers and customers understand it clearly. Of course, it is going to be an ongoing battle as there will be people who want to hack into the system. There is always the need to have a continuous investment in beefing up security standards." 

"Companies that were able to embrace technology were less shocked by malware, while those who tried to shun away from technology were at the receiving end more often," he added.   

Sinha mentioned that some of his clients have taken things a notch higher for maintaining privacy. He commented, "One of our clients – Innoplexus, is using blockchain technology to build something termed as oncocoin which would ensure that cancer patients need to support each other and share information, and one will be able to put things on smart-contacts- on the oncocoin." 

"There are cloud-native tools which are available which can not only help the financial services sector but also the healthcare sector," he added. 

Sinha mentioned that as far as compliance is concerned, cloud service providers have been able to maintain the residentially of data. 

Expectations from a cloud service provider:    

Arbinder Singal, Co-Founder & CEO at Fitterfly suggested that uptime and scalability alongside security are of key importance. 

He commented, "As an emerging start-up in 2017 we had no idea of how many users we will add in the upcoming month and having a fixed server was very expensive, fortunately, AWS (Amazon Web Services) allowed us to start small and we got a lot of starting credits and variability in terms of space." 

"We have data around how many people are eating which kinds of foods and how it is affecting their blood sugar, this is very valuable data not only for diabetes but in general for the food industry and we do not want this data to get lost," he added.  

The panellists concluded the roundtable by stating that there is a lot of potential in the digital healthcare sector, and there is a need to strike the right balance between human touch and digital healthcare.