The Healthcare conferences at the BioAsia 2015 convention, in Hyderabad, India, were launched by Pradeep Chandra, IAS, Special Chief Secretary, Government of Telangana. The Digital health and Healthcare IT conference at the BioAsia 2015 convention, was a much anticipated event. The first session was on whether India was ready for the rapid technological changes shaping healthcare globally. Sangita Reddy , the Joint MD of Apollo Hospitals in India, gave a rather articulate and delightful talk on her transformative experience, implementing telemedicine in India. She felt that India is uniquely positioned to leapfrog legacy technologies to unified, standardized EMRs, especially after the health ministry has purchased a national license to SNOMED-CT. Data mining would be the next logical step to improve standard of care and predict outcomes. BVR Mohan Reddy the Executive Chairman of Cyient Technologies spoke about how IoT (internet of things) applications improve asset utilization and bring down maintenance costs of MRI machines, X Ray machines among other diagnostic equipment. Cyient is also working on Google Gass based solutions to leverage IoT in industrial applications.
The second session dealt with use of technology by the medical fraternity in India. Aravindakshan T S Y, the national manager for industry solutions for health from Microsoft India, touched upon engaged patient experience and how Microsoft is uniquely positioned to leverage the power of cloud computing to provide geographical freedom to providers and consumers. The pervasiveness of technology can really streamline the care continuum. Dr Anthony Vipin Das who is the chief advisor to the government and a collaborator at MIT Media Lab was the moderator of this session. Dr Sai Praveen, a consultant intensivist and pulmonologist at Apollo Hospitals talked about the rise of pervasive point of care diagnostic devices. It was sad to learn how 2 weeks of an ICU stay can bankrupt 25% of his patients but timely interventions at the point of care can reduce the length of stay and improve outcomes. Dr Jitesh Bhatt, the general manager of Vodafone India emphasized the importance of solutions that make business sense in his pilot studies in India.
Analytics driven insight to improve healthcare effectiveness was the theme of the final session. Sudpita Ghosh, a partner at PwC India, moderated the session. Dr Sukumar, Presiden of Optimal Strategix Group clarified the role of analytics in healthcare and stressed upon the importance of having objectives before looking at clean data. Dr Ruchi Das, the CEO of HealthCursor Consulting group spoke about teletriage systems and stressed upon the importance of mining health data acquired with consent to generate actionable insights. As a public health expert she described how context was a big problem in India in her understanding of public health issues and how centralized resource scheduling can really impact the delivery of care to the common man. Martin Kelly, CEO of HealthXL Ireland spoke about how his company fostered collaborations between the biggest healthcare corporations such as Cleveland Clinic, Partners Healthcare, Novartis, IBM among others, and established startups looking for the right industry partners to take their companies to the next level.
The winners of the healthcare hackathon conducted at BioAsia were an inspiring reminder of the power of frugal innovation. Sharath, Manikanta and Vijayabhaskar all students from a prestigious engineering college put their education to good use in developing a self feeding utensil for the disabled. An electomechanical assistive device to impact the lives of 26 million people, all in under 30$ is certainly impressive.
I am pleasantly surprised and frankly excited about the opportunities in digital health and Healthcare IT in India. The challenges of being a startup company are daunting but we at HealSpace are a persistently passionate bunch ! Feel free to email me at: sandeepnapa@healspace.co and reach out to me on LinkedIn at: in.linkedin.com/in/sandeepnapa/
