Gaurav is an alumnus of Marine Engineering and Research Institute, and comes with the experience of more than a decade and a half, has been leading, evangelizing & representing the insurance sector across multiple podiums. With a vision of building a new age health-tech platform to improvise, especially the peripherals of OPD along with the frugal and transcendent healthcare services for millions of Indians, especially the bourgeois of the society, he stepped into the entrepreneur’s shoes with the launch of LivLong.
The digital healthcare sector is on a massive growth path, aided by digital transformation across the ecosystem of healthcare. The pandemic’s infectious nature and unfavorable repercussions necessitated a critical shift in the healthcare sector.
The rising interest in successful treatment triggered a flood in digital advancements inside the ambit of medical services, prompting the evolution of various solutions comprising e-drug stores, teleconsultation, and e-diagnostics. The digital healthcare sector’s tremendous growth can be figured out by its value, INR116.6 billion in 2018, and is estimated to be around INR485.4 billion by 2024.
While the decline in physical interactions and mobility has empowered patients to get online administrations, increasing internet penetration and the adoption of e-commerce has also highlighted the interest in advanced medical care. Undeniably, tools facilitating affordable consultations and an easy interface associating everybody across wellbeing frameworks will probably be the new ordinary. This essential change is progressively helping medical services access to smaller towns and provincial regions.
Telemedicine and virtual care models introduced by the digital healthcare sector proved to be life-saving at the peak of the deadly pandemic. Patients in rural and remote areas, who remained aloof from healthcare, can now afford quality services that were formally out-of-pocket expenses for many.
The change within the healthcare segment on account of digitalization with the increasing internet and smartphone penetration across the globe addresses the gap in the availability of specialist doctors while reducing the burden on tertiary-care hospitals in small cities and rural areas.
Maximizing the medical care system’s potential through advanced innovations requires building on key regions, including supportive infrastructure, upskilled talent and strong rules guaranteeing data security conventions.
Considering the pressing need for technology, the Healthcare players quickly adapt to the various tools. Internet of medical things (IoMT), Artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) is leading the imperative transformation, and smartphones have served as an integral part.
Mobile technology has been revolutionizing the healthcare industry. Various medical and healthcare services providers have integrated telemedicine into their services, including video conferencing, real-time remote monitoring and wireless communications.
The use of cell phones, tablets, wearables and other handheld gadgets to give medical services support, simpler admittance to records, improved frameworks, the superior quality of patient care, therapy adherence and substantially more is referred to as mobile health or mHealth. It also provides physicians access to drug information, the latest medical research, and online learning practices – another vital segment or feature of mHealth.
The two different and distinct, yet equal, developing fields in the mobile healthcare sectors are
- Gadgets, applications and administrations intended for the treatment and patient care
- Devices and wearable technologies intended to improvise a healthy way of life and screen the fitness activities
The global mHealth revenues are expected to increase to around 247 billion dollars by 2025, following its fast adoption in adult and pediatric patient care. Mobile technology has proven to improve the quality of patient care and contribute to back-office operations and medical training.
The benefits provided by health tech on smartphones are innumerable. Fortunately, the few advantages of mHealth have been bundled up as:
- An easy and straightforward coordinated effort among labs and trained professionals
- A streamlined work process and management process
- Upgraded efficiency of medical and healthcare experts
- Better-informed medication and therapy decisions
- Quicker patient-physician communication
- Diminished time on documenting reports
- More noteworthy transparency of patient insurance claims
- Accurate clinical diagnostics
- Constant remote monitoring post-surgery recuperation
- Focused and effective treatments and therapies
- Reduced costs through automation and data driven operational insights
The patients and mobile app users experience the advantages of the mobile health through:
- Customized treatments
- Consultations with experts and specialists from remote areas
- On-time access to emergency wellbeing services
- Easier access to the digital health records
- More control over their health
- Improved medication adherence
- Proficient medical and health care spending
Despite various benefits, the technology-driven health tech needs to combat multiple challenges in the growth process.
Administrative uncertainty: The absence of explicit administrative and regulatory rules for online drug stores and utilization of e-solutions is a challenge for the sector and may prompt fraudulent practices like forged prescriptions.
Infrastructure and abilities: Digital upskilling of professional experts is an immense prerequisite, as the demand for digital skills across industries is high. The absence of an appropriate skilling framework further makes a barricade digital upskilling. Moreover, physical infrastructure and cold chain logistics are expensive and scarcely present in rural regions.
Data privacy and security issues: Remote patient monitors and gadgets are vulnerable and pose security issues, influencing patient-provider privacy.
Absence of standardization: Health tech being at an early stage, needs coordination and standardization, which it lacks and brings about irregularities in patients’ clinical results. Consequently, the normalization of patients’ health records is a significant stage in empowering numerous medical care specialist organizations to access steady, persistent records easily.
Mobile health applications and wearable gadgets have become essential to the medical care industry over the last few years. It has made mobile health one of the sections with the highest potential for advancement in future and one of the most subsidized and funded medical fields worldwide.
The benefits of portable innovation in medical practices vary, including quicker communication, smoothed out efficiency, cost reduction and everything associated with it.
Used every day by specialists, attendants, lab experts, patients, their care-takers, and relatives, mobile technology has demonstrated to be profoundly influential in boosting healthcare services quality to a higher level.