THD NewsDesk, New Delhi: Dr Praveen Gedam, Additional CEO, Ayushman Bharat, spoke at NASSCOM CoE’s telehealth E-conference ‘The Fourth Dimension – Deciphering Telehealth,’ it further initiated towards a research paper, “Unraveling AI for Healthcare in India,” which underlines how AI discoveries can resolve the standard healthcare iron triangle rendering quality concern with upgraded convenience and decreased expenses.
NASSCOM CoE for IoT/AI, following its healthcare leadership LHIF, arranged a virtual gathering issued ‘The Fourth Dimension – Deciphering Telehealth,’ which also observed an exclusive research paper named “Unraveling AI for Healthcare in India” by Lav Agarwal, IAS, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. The research paper, in alliance with EY, was approved by the NASSCOM Research team. It features how AI solutions can unveil the classic healthcare iron triangle providing quality care with upgraded convenience and diminished expenses. The report displays the AI enablement ecosystem in healthcare and sets down necessary motions for healthcare organizations to hasten their AI permission journey.
Saurabh Gaur, IAS, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, explained ‘India Transformation through AI’ and stated, “All emerging technologies will be the engines of growth for the nation. If we want a $5 trillion economy by 2025, we see that these technologies will be great enablers as we forward. There is a huge opportunity for the Indian IT companies also as they now contribute eight per cent to Indian GDP and they can move forward. We look at technology to make healthcare more accessible and affordable. There are opportunities to have creative outcome modelling; when you have huge data you should be able to collate it and work around it to save lives. We would like to have industry partners for each field and collaborate with academia and government. Through the national e-governance system, we have exposed 1300 APIs to access different data sets. We are looking at an exciting future as we move ahead on these technologies.”
Chief Guest Lav Agarwal, IAS, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, addressed, “We as a country always had the strength in terms of IT. In the last 8-10 years, the Ministry of Health has been working on various applications and we also have disease surveillance programmes. We were able to create a large amount of data when National Health Policy Blueprint came in 2019 where we were looking at an accessible and affordable health system. In 2019, India started thinking of an integrated approach, and as part of this came National Digital Health blueprint. It was to bring all the initiatives together and create an electronic health record.”
Remarking on telehealth and how India may influence technology, he further added, “We have ongoing programme National Medical Network and we have created a structure for them which has a national centre and several regional centres that will become the hub for telemedicine services. Then we have an E-Sanjeevani application developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Mohali; we are strengthening the application by making all the centres to start using this application and right now 24 states are using this application. We are the biggest telemedicine provider in the world today. To make this application more robust, our friends can come up with good ideas. Can we have a chatbox on top of this application which can provide information to the consumer and can it be integrated in such a manner so that application starts thinking of clinical support decisions.”
Dr Praveen Gedam, IAS, additional CEO Ayushman Bharat, National Health Authority, Govt of India, said that India immediately developed telemedicine regulations when the lockdown was declared. He further added, “The advantage that India has for AI-based clinical support system is the sheer amount of data that we have as it will help in a better quality of additional support systems. E-sanjeevani has already crossed three lakh consultations and MHA is already making one more telemedicine platform. We want more such platforms so that people can benefit from the competition. We already are medical tourism hub and we can now become telemedicine hub for the world also. We can scale up very fast as is evident from the success of the Aarogya Setu app, which reached 130-140 million downloads in a couple of months.”
Nick Passey, Vice President Digital & IT, International & Japan, AstraZeneca, UK, highlighted the benefits of telehealth medicines. He also added, “As a patient-centric organisation, our ambition is to improve patient outcomes by facilitating their journey from awareness and diagnosis to treatment and recovery. We thus believe telehealth plays an important role in enabling patients’ access to HCPs, especially with specialists in areas of non-communicable diseases. Telehealth will also shape an approach that is adaptable and can be tailored to the needs and preferences of the end-user as we move forward. Our model of partnering with startups and providing them scale to achieve this ambition has successfully been proven in many countries.”
Sanjeev Malhotra, CEO, NASSCOM CoE, said, “The focus on healthcare innovation has never been so important. CoE with its industry partners and support from MeitY and MoHFW is accelerating creation and Scaling of new technology solutions from startups and large companies.”
Raghuram Janapareddy, Director of Healthcare & Life sciences, NASSCOM CoE, and mediator of the virtual meet said, “With the advent of new technologies such as IoT & AI, telehealth is going to emerge as a strong healthcare delivery channel. It is not only a new channel but cuts across and enhances the way care is delivered through primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare channels.”
Dr Reema Aswani from NASSCOM Research Team described the crucial pointers of the examination report to the viewers. Meanwhile, different speakers explained to an extent about ‘Ethical & Legal Contours around TeleHealth’ and ‘Leveraging Telehealth for Health Insurance.’
The supremacy of telemedicine policies for patient/doctor conferences came as positive aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic even when social distancing is widespread.
Source- Express Healthcare
