Digitalization of healthcare in India: Have we jumped on the campaign yet?

Abstract

India is a vast country with a population of 1.4 billion. With billions of lives on the line, access to healthcare and support systems should be the number one priority. Digitalization is a key to implementing decision making in a country of the size of India. Its implementation is expected to improve the overall efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency in Indian Healthcare and encourage the seamless delivery of personalized solutions making healthcare more patient-centric in India. As a result, advanced digital and data-enabled technologies increasingly diffuse the healthcare market, which undergoes a costly and massive digital transformation. According to a report, the Indian hospital industry accounts for 80% of the total healthcare market which is expected to touch US$132 billion by 2023. The digital health concept was first introduced in 2000 by Frank. Digital Health refers to “Integrating information Technology into Health care services and encompasses an array of components.” It uses information and communication technologies to facilitate understanding of health problems and challenges faced by people receiving medical treatment and social prescribing in more personalized and precise ways. The definitions of digital health and its remits overlap in many ways with those of health and medical informatics. Not just modern healthcare, but, in fact, our whole routine life is difficult to imagine without the use of technology. This has been acutely realized during the COVID-19 pandemic recently forcing the entire globe to adopt digital health and health technologies on a large scale.