Data Revolution in Healthcare and Lifesciences Industry

From remote monitoring to disease management, wireless technology is helping to improve healthcare outcomes and address the healthcare worker shortage. In the U.S., chronic disease treatment costs more than $1.4 trillion each year, but using mHealth could mean a savings of more than $21.1 billion per year. But in India there is this unique pattern of adoption and push that is to be understood. Over the last decade, telehealth in India has been primarily facilitated and driven by government funding. The government now has a majorpolicy initiative in mobile health . However, in pursuing the broad initiative there is a danger that some of the smaller components can get lost, and this is probably what has happened to telehealth. Many government-driven telemedicine programmes have failed to live a long life. It is no secret that these programmes do not have a successful business model and die after the government grants run out. But if you are a medical device, mhealth app or Disea...

Dear Friends, It is been a while since I wrote my last post. Life hasn't been easy after we claimed the title of "the only niche mHealth consulting company" in India. But we are doing fairly good by going just well. This post of mine is centred towards Disease surveillance and missing links in India. Very recently when I joined the UN's Best Practices and Innovations Working Group for Maternal and child health, I went deep dive to understand the problems in this sector. The revelations were quite alarming... Infant mortality remains as high as 63 deaths per 1,000 live births. Most infant deaths occur in the first month of life, with up to 47 per cent in the first week Diarrhoea remains the second major cause of death among children, after respiratory-tract infections. Unhygienic practices and unsafe drinking water are some of its main causes. India has an estimated 220,000 children infected by HIV. It is estimated that 55,000 to 60,000 children are born e...

Mobile Health is going to be a 3000 crore market in India by 2017. (Source PwC). M-health (use of mobile phones) and E-health are all set to make an entry into India's primary health centres (PHCs) and sub-centres as the health ministry plans to go hi-tech. Healthcare industry is expected to show a strong growth of 23% per annum to become a US$ 77 billion industry by 2012. One of the largest sector in terms of revenue and employment has grown at 9.3% per annum between 2000-2009 with a current size at par with fastest growing developing country like China, Brazil and Mexico.Driven by various catalysts such as increasing population, rising income levels, changing demographics and illness profile with a shift from chronic to life style diseases, healthcare industry is expected to move to levels of US$ 77 billion in next 3 years. (Source: ASSOCHAM). Empowering rural India is of utmost importance and the government needs to do so by provisioning for broadband penetration and ...

Was busy the last weekend preparing for the GTF conference in Delhi.You can learn more about this by clicking on the emblem on the left . Government Transformation Forum is first of its kind forum aimed at enhancing collaboration and exchange of learning practices among the industry, academia, civil society organizations and the public sector in India. Through this forum, the organizers intend to keep the stakeholders abreast of the latest trends and cutting edge technologies so that the e‐Government programs are designed keeping in view the needs of the next generation. You can expect a lot of action here... I was thinking while discussing the mobile health care concept with my peers, that if in case my Medical Insurance can't give me freedom from long waiting periods; my prescription delivered at home; Nurse and physiotherapy facility and continuous monitoring for my old parents and Real time Emergency Response in seconds, probably I will not opt for one. But in India, is it...

I have many many people, many startups and several small and big firms working on mhealth today. UHC is coming into it, Vodafone, Ericcsson, Nokia and many others have already participated in the same. The upcoming news boards like mobihealthnews, telecareaware etc. are also up.WHO is into it, so is World bank, mhealth alliance is formed by UN and much much more. But why aren't we moving ahead on it ...what is required? The first thing is strategising. We need to go step by step especialliy in developing countries, coz here its the Operator's market unlike other countries. What I and Vikas were debating about was whether you do the technical work (software) on the ground or build solutions beforehand. As usual, it depends on the circumstances of a particular situation and project. My belief is that each country should have a platform available for launching national health services. Governments should either enable the process by working hand-in-hand or fund and get out of the ...

India is the second most populous country of the world and has changing socio-political-demographic and morbidity patterns that have been drawing global attention in recent years. Despite several growth-orientated policies adopted by the government, the widening economic, regional and gender disparities are posing challenges for the health sector. About 75% of health infrastructure, medical manpower and other health resources are concentrated in urban areas where only 27% of the Indian population live. The new buzz is Mobile Health; in simple words it means access to valuable information and consultation for preventive and post treatment advice targeted at doctors and end users. The idea is to use telecom as a backbone tool to leverage the current brick and mortar model of Healthcare delivery across the country. The scope of Telecom as well as technology to disseminate valuable and personalised Health information is now evolving. Better practices are expected to rely heavily on telecom...

The Mobile Healthcare Industry summit brought up all the stakeholders to discuss and share views on the best practices all across the world. The Post Conference Workshop led by me on “Mobile Healthcare Models for emerging markets” provided a participating opportunity for all players in the ecosystem to clearly define and strategize Challenges as well as opportunities in countries like India, South Africa, Kenya, Indonesia etc. I was pleased to see the overwhelming response and enthusiasm. Some Key points that were discussed were why emerging markets? What is the role of mhealth in India, Africa etc.? Who will pay? Why will they adopt mhealth systems? Pretti Lounamaa and Seppo Luede suggested some very initial points to approach these methodologies. First, Size the market, when we are talking about market we are not only talking about the addressable market but also the number of stakeholders and customers who are willing as well as able to purchase or are interested to deploy. This was...

Pharma Companies under Focus How can Mobiles add value to the B2B order processing and Process Management? Here you will have to go by the Healthcare Value chain. Mobility value add in Order processing i.e. B2B will be helpful only if: It eases out product procurement and delivery It helps stumbling blocks to improved value chain operations For this one need to understand the strategies in three product areas i.e. pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and medical-surgical products and other such deliverables.Let's take the pharmacy market first! There is already a scope for healthcare products/Devices and Pharma products as far as process management in the value chain are concerned. Introduction of M-commerce in health care value chain is also worth pondering over. For eg. Mobiles can be useful in effectively managing a small scale industry supply chain. Similarly, managing prescription order workflow in a pharmacy network can be done using mobile phones. A wo...