Opportunities in Health Care Domain in India
The opportunity I am talking below is in Health Care domains which India will be dominant in some years from now.
Indian Medical System is on an upbeat and in a very naive state where no advanced systems and Government regulations are present. In US, there is a law under implementation to store all the patients data in a US central database, so that the patients information, his previous medical history, medicine information etc are available across hospitals. This is not yet done.
Now if you map this to Indian medical scenario, there should be a similar system, but in a different form.
There are several big hospital chains, also there is a huge IT penetration amongst good doctors where they have access to Internet and computers. Now if there is a “hosted web based solution” which will gather all the patients information, his medical reports and store centrally, so that patient need not carry any papers. Moreover if he travels across hospitals, doctors can retrieve information. This patients family can view all the information online, communicate with doctors etc also.
Now the initial survey we have to do is –
1. “Whether hospitals and doctors” need such system?
2. Are they willing to use such system and store information online.
3. Say out of 100 patients who visit big hospitals, I understand not all be willing to signup for such feature … but we need to find out how many patients are literate enough to understand this and buy this concept. So we need to understand that number X.
4. We also need to figure out who will pay the money for our service. My initial thought is patient. But we can also think of selling it to hospitals under the name that we are streamlining their paper work, storing information online for them to view, integrating their machines with the software etc etc. But in any case we need to come up with what amount per person to charge?
I agree this thinking might not work today. I mean Indian patients and hospitals are not ready for this. But imagine 3 years down the line, where Indian Medical system is seeing more foreigners, more people leaving their parents and going to US, more IT savvy people coming onboard etc … considering all this, I think its worth a try talking to Medical people/ directors and finding out the need of such hosted service.
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Ananda Agrawal said,
January 29, 2009 @ 2:02 pm
Nice thoughts Sujay. However I would like to add few more points..
1. Biggest obstacle in US is willingness on the Part of Providers (read Doctors/hospitals) to implement such a thing.. and what are the incentives for them.. Need to consider such thing in India..
2. I don’t think the model where Patient need to pay will work. All these have to be sponsored through health plans and Govt funding.
3. We have to analyze how Google health and Microsoft Healthvault (etc etc) will shape the healthcare industry.
Also we need an initiative similar to US. First 5 or 10 years, doctors and hospitals should be encouraged to adopt EMRs (and provide them incentives for that). After that, there would be penalty for adopting these. It’s not a question of whether hospitals and doctors need these and whether they are willing to go online. These should be done through policy implementation.
I have some more thoughts around this. Keep watching this space!!