Digital innovations to drive a unified digital health system in India
With the second wave of Covid19 sweeping over India, the focus on the healthcare sector has been renewed. In the midst of the pandemic, it has had to innovate and change, and digital healthcare became a solution for reducing the imperfections in caregiving and personalising the experience. A clear learning that emerged from the first wave, however, was that healthcare and ancillary sectors must not be looked at in silos but as part of the larger ecosystem.
To explore how digital innovations could enable India to move towards a unified digital health system, Forbes India hosted a webinar on ‘Transforming Healthcare with Technology’, powered by Epillo Health Systems, an enterprise that aims to help people lead healthier and safer lifestyle, through products and services that connect, automate, disrupt and bring innovation to the digital health landscape.
The webinar covered various facets of the theme, enabling an understanding of how health-tech companies were truly unlocking the potential of digital transformation in healthcare. It also touched upon how healthcare was transforming, with the use of new technologies like blockchain, AI, ML, etc.,
Moderated by Manu Balachandran, Assistant Editor, Forbes India, the panel of healthcare industry luminaries, which included Meena Ganesh, CEO and MD, Portea; Dr Arvind Lal, CMD, Lal PathLabs; Vijender Singh, CEO, Metropolis Healthcare Limited; Mukesh Rathi, CIO, Dr. Reddy's Laboratories; Dr Bhupinder Singh, Chair of Board, Epillo Health Systems and Aasif Shah, CEO, Epillo Health Systems, shared their views and insights on how a tech-enabled approach could aid in the early diagnosis and detection of diseases and improve healthcare management.
In the midst of the second wave, it could be said that the industry, in general, could have been better prepared to deal with this round of the pandemic. As Mukesh Rathi pointed out, “When the first lockdown was announced, our early investments in technologies allowed us to continue operations and make medicines. Lack of information and awareness about medicines is making this a multi-fold problem. It is about finding right used cases.”