Health care in India faces several challenges including inadequate access, low insurance penetration and a growing chronic disease burden. At the same time, traditional business models have found it hard to show attractive returns on investment, except for a few large providers. Technology infusion — along with expanded infrastructure and efficiencies from process improvements — could help improve health care accessibility and affordability, according to experts who spoke about emerging trends in that industry at the 2020 Wharton India Economic Forum, held this month in Mumbai.
Despite its shortcomings, India’s health care sector has a lot going for it on several fronts. A government-led push to get health care providers to embrace electronic medical records is enabling artificial intelligence (AI) to extract insights from patient data to deliver better treatment. The availability of telecom bandwidth is making medical expertise reach underserved rural markets through telemedicine and tele-consulting programs, delivered over mobile phones.
The Indian government’s ‘Make in India’ initiative is encouraging domestic manufacture of medical devices and helping lower the prices patients pay for products such as stents and implants, which in the past were imported. At the same time, in India the policy environment and regulators need to accommodate technological interventions such as the growth of online pharmacies with the requisite controls in place, according to the panelists. Health care innovation in India could serve as a global model for a shift from treating the sick to preventive care and wellness, given the size of its underserved populations, they said.
Health care has the potential to lead to economic growth and to provide employment, but it also is a crucial sector in terms of “protecting the health and the wealth of the nation,” said Sangita Reddy, joint managing director of Apollo Hospitals, a chain of health care facilities, and president of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industries.
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Health care offers the opportunity to find ways to make medical services “more understandable, affordable and accessible,” said Gaurav Agarwal, co-founder and chief technology officer at 1 mg, an online pharmacy and digital health care platform. The three-year-old firm, based in Gurugram in India’s northwestern state of Haryana, has already seen 85 million customer visits annually to its platform, which allows patients to not just buy medicines but also make bookings for lab tests or doctor consultations.
India’s health care industry is becoming more and more attractive for investors, with technology-led innovations helping penetrate second- and third-tier markets, said Puncham Mukim, managing director at Everstone Capital Advisors in Mumbai. The firm has investments across health care investment categories including hospitals and medical device makers, and aims to invest between $400 million and $500 million over the next two years, he said.
Changing the Dialogue
In laying out India’s health care challenges, Reddy noted that across the entire supply chain from the general medical practitioners to tertiary care hospitals and government-run facilities, “everybody is working on incremental access.” At the same time, she said the country has “high quality health care,” and that the private sector provides more than 76% of such care. She described that scenario as “islands of excellence in an ocean of inadequacy.”
Source: Knowledge@Wharton
