Abstract
The reason for considering ICT-based communication platforms, especially mobile phones, as the most efficacious media tool to interconnect health care providers, practitioners and other stakeholders to a substantially large number of consumers in the healthcare system is that the mobile phone subscribers in India has reached to 1,013.23 million in the third quarter of 2018. The prices of smartphones have also come down by 11 percent with a demand for 4G devices capturing 6 percent of smartphone unit demand in India. Hence, it is an appropriate time to understand that the future of healthcare business in India lies with mobile based healthcare services. This chapter explores some of the significant innovations taking place in mobile healthcare business in India and examines the emerging approach of integrated health care ecosystems to provide quality health services to everyone where and when it is required.
TopHealthcare Business In India
With increased digital adoption in last one decade, the Indian health care market, which is worth around US $ 100 billion, will likely to grow at a CAGR of 23 per cent to US $ 280 billion by 2020. The Indian health care market has a possibility to increase three-fold to US $ 372 billion by 2022 (Shetty, 2018). Although, India ranks 112th on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) ranking of the world’s health system, and the doctor-to-patient ratio for rural India, as per the Health Ministry statistics stands at 1:30,000, much below than the WHO’s recommended 1:1,000. The overall healthcare spending (public and private) accounts for a mere 4 per cent of India’s GDP, far below than the average of 9.5 per cent across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Even in this, the private healthcare sector accounts for more than 70 per cent of this spend; while the public healthcare spends only 1.4 per cent. In term of the total health expenditure per capita, India spends about 1 per cent of its GDP on public health, compared to 3 per cent in China and 8.3 per cent in the United States. In 2018, the Union budget has allocated 52,800 crore INR for the healthcare sector but still the allocation is much less than other BRIC nations.
With the rising middle-class population, the average real household disposable income is doubled from 2010 to 2018 leading to an increased expenditure on healthcare. It is estimated that, by the end of 2020 the country will require an additional 1.8 million new beds to fulfil the targeted 2 beds per thousand people. The emerging challenges will be the infrastructural requirement for primary and community health centres, nursing homes, clinics, hospitals; and the skill gap - shortage of doctors and trained para-medical staff. The solution is the deployment of wireless mobile communication technology and its linkages to rural areas to bridge the gap between the increasing healthcare demands and the services need to provide (Blaya, Fraser & Holt, 2010).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Mobile Technology for Community Health: The transformation of disease management by managing sample tracking, treatment registration and adherence, patient tracking, treatment reminders, alerts and reporting.
MHealth: A general term for the use of mobile phones and other wireless technology in medical care to educate consumers about preventive healthcare services and for disease surveillance, treatment support, epidemic outbreak tracking and chronic disease management.
Mobile Technologies: Includes mobile phones, personal digital assistants, smartphones and handheld/ultra-portable computer devices having a range of functions and applications like photos and video (MMS), telephone and web access and various software application supports.
Digital Health: The digitization of paper-based patient records/prescriptions to reduce the errors causes due to illegible handwriting and drug name confusion. It helps to detect anomalies and efforts in automating health alerts.
Health Mobility: Mobility of mobile technologies used in healthcare business allowing the temporal synchronization of healthcare intervention delivery claiming people’s attention.
Integrated Healthcare: It is an approach to deal with healthcare system networks and connections between different healthcare organizations with a focus to increase the continuum of healthcare delivery around patients and populations.
Healthcare: The maintenance or improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in human beings.
World Health Partners: A multi-level service delivery network which leverages the latest development in telemedicine and point-of-care diagnostic technology to improve access and quality of healthcare services.
Citizen Health Information System: A biometric based health information system which constantly updates health record of every citizen-family. The system incorporates registration of births and deaths, maternal and infant death reviews, nutrition surveillance among children and women.
Mediphone: A tele-triage facility for immediate healthcare related acute minor ailment over phone. The service allows everyone to get medical advice by an expert team of doctors and qualified para-medical staffs.
Digital Hospital: An ICT-based hospital that connects all of its digital medical equipment with a standardized program to increase the efficiency of the hospital operations, diagnosis, and treatment.
Health Governance: A synergy of building up healthcare capabilities, policies and business and care models to make ICT based healthcare services effective and quick.
Healthcare Ecosystem: Basically known as an ecosystem of interconnected stakeholders in the healthcare system where each one takes initiatives to improve the quality of care while lowering the cost of the care.