Managing Healthcare Digitally — The New Normal for Next Billion Indians?
The Ankur Capital team caught up with Joy Chakraborty (COO, PD Hinduja Hospital), Prashant Tandon (Co-founder & CEO of 1MG), Shailesh Prithani (Founder, Doxper) and Pinak Shrikhande (Principal, Healthquad) to discuss how they view the Indian healthcare landscape evolving over the next few years.
This diverse and accomplished panel was able to give us first-hand insights on a variety of topics ranging from digitization in hospitals, adoption of tele-medicine, interactions between different stakeholders in the value chain such as pharma companies and healthcare service providers and most importantly, on what will be the new normal for the healthcare sector in the post-Covid world.
While Joy spoke of how digitising is changing in hospitals and the adoption of teleconsultations early on during the pandemic, Shailesh spoke of the importance of understanding the value proposition for each customer segment to encourage adoption of digitization for not just large organizations such as PD Hinduja but also for smaller establishments — as he aptly put it,
“It is important for enablers to showcase value which will enable digitization”.
Despite increasing rate of adoption of cutting-edge technology, Joy cautioned against expectations of end-to-end digitization. In every hospital 20–25% of doctors will be willing to adopt enthusiastically but full adoption will take some time.
Prashant touched upon changing consumer behaviour by taking up the example of the traditional pharma sales models involving representatives visit clinics and doctors and how we will see a drastic shift where reps will look for better engagement with doctors through digital channels. Even in supply chains, tracking and tracing is going to be paramount, especially in the case of high value drugs.
Pinak through his regular interactions with emerging companies in the healthcare space was able to give us an interesting perspective on how hospitals are integrating technology —
“Acute care and surgeries will be in-hospital but OPDs will shift to a telemedicine format”.
Interestingly, while telemedicine as a format has been around for several years, it has taken a pandemic for us to realize the various ways in which it can benefit the healthcare industry and especially, for first consultations with practitioners. Even in diagnostics, radiology and pathology, tele-platforms can be deployed easily. Take for instance the case of our portfolio company — Karma Healthcare. While they were one of the first movers in the telemedicine space several years ago, they have seen a sudden surge in interest for their solution from private and government establishments alike!
An interesting question put to our panel was on whether we will see the emergence of neo-hospitals, similar to neo-banks where we saw traditional banking channels integrated with fintech solutions. Our panellists felt that though neo-hospitals can emerge in the primary and secondary care space and for chronic follow-ups, it will be several years into the future, if at all. Internet first hospitals are already emerging in China and that seems to be the trend that is fast catching on.
Some other interesting takeaways were on the importance of quality data for clinical support systems and the ever-growing interest in patient data analytics to increase the quality of healthcare services. In terms of decision support, areas where processes are manual appear to be a big whitespace. An example of this is analytics for microbial resistance patterns in specific hospital environments. Also, Covid is a watershed moment for proactive health management as opposed to reactive!
All in all, our key takeaways were:
1. Emergence of internet hospitals
2. Lifestyle & chronic disease management will see a huge digital push freeing up resources for procedures and diseases requiring traditional healthcare delivery methods
3. POC Diagnostics solutions will see an increase in adoption
4. Lastly, it is not just the doctors who will drive disruption and adoption, but patients will pay an equally important role.
This appears to be a demonetisation moment for healthcare services in the country. While we will only be able to evaluate the full impact a few months down the line, it sure has accelerated the pace of digitisation in the sector, thereby unlocking several opportunities for solution providers to disrupt and reach the next billion Indians.
If you are innovating with a focus on disrupting the healthcare sector for the next billion Indians, we would love to hear about what you are doing and encourage you to apply for our next session of Funding Friday, where our team spends quality time with each entrepreneur to understand how they are building the future! Apply here.
In case you were not able to attend the session, you can catch it on YouTube or listen to the podcast here.
