Digitisation and innovation transforming India’s healthcare post COVID-19: PwC India – ET HealthWorld

New Delhi: Large-scale deployment of digital technologies and innovations are transforming India’s healthcare landscape post the COVID-19 pandemic. The report titled ‘A new healthcare era -Trends in a post-pandemic world’ by PwC indicated.

The report highlighted that the increased focus on digitalisation has helped in accelerating contactless healthcare and faster decision making. Technological innovations have further helped patients and consumers to understand diseases better and subsequently, demand higher-quality healthcare services.

The emergence of COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a clear shift from physical healthcare centres to virtual-first care. There has also been a transition from medication to holistic addressable adjacencies, thereby disrupting traditional pharma practices. Digitalisation in the health sector has acted as a lever in unlocking agility and helping players move up the value chain across the sustainable well-being spectrum. The telemedicine model has picked up pace and has now become a full-stack virtual care model widely in use across the country.

Commenting on technological advancements in the healthcare sector, Dr Rana Mehta, Partner and Leader Healthcare PwC India, said, “Voice-based AI will bring in the next big transformation in healthcare. Such a technological advancement would enhance the upstream value of the healthcare framework and further usher in the ambient era of voice user interface (VUI). Consumer demand, innovation in technology, and enablers are driving alternative models of care and transforming the healthcare landscape.”

As per the report, contactless care is gaining ample momentum and the focus is moving towards reducing and optimizing the number of touchpoints between the health system and health seeker, without losing the quality of care. This new need to optimize steps has resulted in deep minimalism – a concept closely associated with the ability of a system to simplify steps without compromising with quality. This includes decision support to virtual treatment enablement, single engagement with multiple touchpoints, telemedicine to teletherapy and graphical user interface (GUI) to VUI. The ecosystem has enabled access to quality healthcare through digital health, open network and open protocols.

The report annotated that consumer preferences are driving the evolution of healthcare delivery models which creates added value for all the players in the ecosystem, be it capturing of data to use of insights engines and advanced analytics. The pandemic’s impact compelled healthcare organisations to rethink, reprioritise and reengineer the business models which are now addressing the emerging challenges for the entire healthcare delivery ecosystem, such as adopting virtual-first healthcare delivery models on a larger scale. This allows for a more efficient, sustainable, technology-enabled and scale-ready healthcare ecosystem. COVID-19 also opened up research and development in molecular diagnostics, the potential for which largely remained untapped till now.

The PwC report pointed that the pandemic resulted in the healthcare ecosystem exploring more holistic models of care delivery. The preparatory shift across the healthcare value chain aims at improving both business and health outcomes. For example, the oncology space has undergone a major transformation with the emergence of more distributed models as the demand for personalized and advanced therapy increases. Government and the private sector have undertaken various initiatives amidst the rising demand of healthcare services like increase in health insurance penetration, coverage and innovation, universal health insurance coverage through digital exponential technologies; and early detection of illness to continuum of care.

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