Smartwatches checking vitals to highlight a potential medical condition. Robots performing medical procedures over 5G networks. Patients consulting doctors over video calls on a mobile phone. A government app helping vaccinate more than 2 billion people during a global pandemic. Twenty-five years ago, such events were in the realm of fiction, at least in India. Today, these are very real, recent happenings.
The adoption of technology has massively transformed the healthcare space in India in the past few decades, with the pandemic further accelerating the trend. What will the space look like in 2047, when India completes 100 years of independence? While it is difficult to accurately predict where the space will be, it is possible to spot a few trends that have emerged post-Covid-19. For instance, people have become conscious of leading a healthy lifestyle, and are ready to spend more on preventive health. Covid-19 also stretched healthcare infrastructure and service delivery to their limits, setting the stage for more investments and the inclusion of advanced technology to combat future pandemics and existing life-threatening diseases.
“Creating a tech-enabled resilient health ecosystem to effectively manage the ongoing pandemic and responding to any pandemic in the future is the need of the hour,” Mansukh Mandaviya, Union Minister for Health & Family Welfare, said in a tweet in May 2022.
Take tele-medicine, for instance. The platform, where doctors can diagnose and treat patients remotely using telecommunications, is one of the first technologies the government deployed during the pandemic. Called eSanjeevani, it is a national tele-medicine service to provide free of cost tele-consultations to citizens for Covid-19 as well as non-Covid-19 ailments. eSanjeevani has clocked around 80 million tele-consultations till December 2022. In less than three years, it has become the world’s largest government-owned tele-medicine platform.
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