 |
| Healthcare Revolution |
If you go down memory lane and
revisit the Rajiv Gandhi era of 1985, you should able to remember the fragile and
non-existent telecom system of India. I
know a vast majority of the internet population will not be able to understand
as they are born in the age of cell phones. They are fortunate enough to see
landlines in museums and lift a receiver to play with rather than to call someone.
During this time getting a
landline was like a dream come true if you don’t belong to the crème de la
crème. Then Rajiv planted the seeds of
the telecom revolution with the help of a telecom engineer, inventor, entrepreneur, policymaker and most
importantly a visionary. I am sure you must have understood that I am talking
about Sam Pitroda. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Pitroda)
Without going into politics, this is not a political article, I will say that every
successive government followed the open market policy, and India witnessed multiple
revolutions which have practically changed the face of the Agriculture based
economy. Telecom, followed by the Computer, followed by the internet and many
more revolutions put India on the world map as a country with an emerging
market.
Today this country is at the
doorstep of another revolution. This is one of the most important revolutions
because it touches human lives. If you analyze and compare the Indian
healthcare system with that of any developed country then you will realize that
it is one of the most disorganized sectors.
This sector is contains all illnesses and any change in it will
certainly be welcomed by the masses.
This sector is plagued with high prices, low quality, excessive delays, low
expense on research, and above all corrupt practices.
However, if you are little close
to reality, you can notice an undercurrent of change ready to sweep this sector
and weed out malpractices. Majority of
these changes are self-driven, entrepreneur based, and not sponsored by the
government. This situation is impressive to a certain extent because
self-driven systems face less resistance as compared to government sponsored. Now
let us analyze some of the subtle, yet significant change, which you can notice
while using the system as an end user, a patient, or relative of a patient.
1. In
the year 2015 I was actively monitoring the health of my Father-in-law, and during
this time a Patna ( B-Grade City in India) based laboratory gave me access to
all of his lab results, which I
reviewed in California . In my mind this is the primary
purpose of patient portal and a key component of Electronic health records
(EHR). I agree that the laboratory may not have a robust system in place to
take care of privacy concerns (Also known as HIPAA Laws in the United States: Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability -1996 ACT). But then
again, “Rome was not built in a day”.
2. Few
years ago, I talked about mail order pharmacy, the majority of my friends
discarded the idea by saying it won’t work in India as it is a highly
dis-organized. Today multiple mail order
pharmacies are operating in the country with services such as 1mg.com,
netmeds.com etc.
3. Today
if you need appointment with a general physician or with a specialist, you need
not go to his clinic to book an appointment. Instead you will turn to
practo.com or some other similar web-site to book an appointment instantly.
All achievements I listed above
are relatively simple and entrepreneur driven. However the road ahead is very
interesting. When I say interesting, I didn’t mean long and tiring. This
revolution will sweep the country faster than we imagine. It will be faster
because this is the internet era and information travels at the speed of light,
if not faster.
One thing which will favor the
healthcare revolution in India is the existing system followed in the western
world. We have a working model and we need to learn from this existing system,
analyze it correctly, and pick the best practices while discarding some of the ineffective
processes.
I will go back to the Telecom
revolution as my example. When India embarked on telecom journey it certainly
learnt from western countries. However they took this journey ahead than their
western counterpart. Today’s Indian telecom sector is equally flexible, cheap,
and quality conscious than any other developed country.
I do see the same kind of synergy
happening in the healthcare. Once the
government will start planning to regularize health industry, all the necessary
framework is already present. India doesn’t need to design the framework, rather
only adopt the framework and tailor it to suit the need of the country. Let me give some examples which may be able
to substantiate my theory of synergy.
1. Recently
America underwent a massive change of a diagnosis Code called ICD-10 migration
from ICD-9. ICD stands for International
Classification of Diseases. This change occurred in every hospital, private
doctor offices, Pharmacies, and claim processing centers. This was a huge effort involving tens of thousands of IT
and Business hours and dollars. India can directly go to ICD-10 and skip the
painful process of migrating from ICD-9 to ICD-10. To this effect, I did see a plan from the
Government of India detailing the implementation of ICD-10.
2. United
States went to multiple phases of Electronic Health record implementation which
they labeled as MU1, MU2 and MU3. MU
stands for “Meaningful use”. India doesn’t
need to go through this evolution of MU1 to MU3. They can directly move to MU3 or somewhere in
between MU2 and Mu3
3.
Similarly
India can derive many best practices from the healthcare insurance industry
such as claim processing and other business processes.
I am not trying to paint a rosy picture here. I am only
saying that with the help of the internet, program implementation and rollout
are becoming increasingly fast. We are at an intersection and a little push
from the Government will get the ball rolling and revolution will move towards
maturity from its current nascent phase.
