A power-packed discussion with healthcare CEOs, hosted by Microsoft, brought out some concrete submissions on how technology will play a critical role in enabling healthcare. By Prathiba Raju
Tech giant Microsoft, along with Express Healthcare, recently organised a round table with select healthcare CEOs on the ‘Digital Transformation in Healthcare.’ The prime focus of the select meeting was on how digitisation could help deliver superior services amid growing patient demand for better a experience.
The two hour-long discussion was chaired by Jean-Philippe Courtois (JPC), Executive Vice President and President, Microsoft Global Sales, Marketing and Operations, who gave a broad overview of Microsoft’s mission to make healthcare more accessible and affordable for people across the region, using technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cortana.
Initiating the discussion, moderator of the roundtable session, Dr Rana Mehta, Leader-Healthcare, PwC India commented that the digital revolution is actually expected to happen across the continuum of care and asked how the private sector viewed this trend as the digital revolution sets in.
Briefing about private sector’s view on digital revolution in healthcare space, Sangita Reddy, Joint MD, Apollo Hospitals, said,”In India, one needs to look at multiple factors like scaling, innovation, access, financing and efficiency. A combination of all these factors are driven by IT at different levels. They cannot replace hospitals but will definitely have an influence.”
Further drawing an analogy between healthcare and the telecom space, Reddy informed that the infrastructure facilities put up and the investment made by the telecom sector are seeing benefits by big players like Google and Amazon. The value realisation out of the original infrastructure is getting realised. Similarly, pharmaceutical companies and hospital providers must seriously look at how they can connect the ‘Überisation and WhatAppisation’ of healthcare, alluding to the increasing number of apps in the healthcare space.
Ajay Bakshi, CEO, Manipal Hospital opined that hospitals are the fulcrum of the healthcare ecosystem as patients trust the doctor. Thus, the patient will approach a hospital with his health issues rather than a telecom company, even if they provide the latest technology.
“So hospitals have to find a way to reach out to the community instead of looking for other companies like doctor appointment booking sites to tell us what we have to do,” he added.
Agreeing with Bakshi and drawing attention towards patient care and safety, Rajit Mehta, CEO, Max Healthcare, said, “Patient care safety is the most neglected aspect in healthcare. I’m struggling to find a technology where we could enforce a simple measure like hand hygiene in hospitals. Interestingly, in South Korea there is a gadget where the ICU door does not open until you use a hand sanitiser. Here, nobody has actually looked at what kind of digital technology is needed in healthcare, they just assume. We need a private ecosystem to handle health variables and monitoring.”
Key takeaways for hospitals on the path to digitisation
- Follow one common billing format be it CGHS or ECHS. A simplified commercial terminology should be followed.
- Move into the bandwidth of SNOMED CT, (A Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine — Clinical Terms) which is free for both private and government hospitals:
- Common PHR empowering the patients storing the summary of the patients and building the option for continuum care.
- Hospitals should agree to the STG with insurance companies as it will change and help creating minimum standards of care.
- Equivalent to NABH which is an infrastructure play, there needs to be a process play. As there is a complete lack of business model for scaling up. This is because hospitals are cutting down on quality
- Hospitals should think about different levels of digitisation as per the capability, be it common HIS platform or imbibing AI. Hospitals should decide the where and how of digitisation.
- Microsoft looks at enabling doctors for tomorrow and brainstorming on how to engage with and help them make the digital transformation smoothly
- Increasing the digital capacity and enabling doctors with AI so that the decision making for doctors becomes easy.
- Invest in systems and technologies to make hospitals cyber secure
Touching upon Artificial Intelligence (AI), one of the core areas in healthcare digitisation and how the doctors see it’s role, Bakshi informed that neuroscience is learning more from computer science and it is a two-way dialogue. He also accepted that computers bring in a lot of power. He stressed that digital technology should be more involved in the decision making part of medicine practice, not the motor, physical or surgery part of the procedure and affirmed that it will take another decade for robots to take the place of surgeons.
“The decision making part of the medicine will migrate away from the doctor to the machine even as early as 2022, 2023 since digitsation is moving at an exponential space,” he said.
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Detailing about the role of AI in healthcare, Courtois informed that AI reinvents and automates healthcare. It also holds far greater promise which helps humans and machines to work together. Further he said, “It is not just collecting and passing signals but we capture people’s emotions and symptoms. We see incredible potential in using AI as it has the capability of protecting privacy, transparency and security.”
Agreeing with this premise, Naresh Kapoor, CEO, BLK Super Specialty Hospital also pointed out that AI has a role to play not only in large hospitals and metro cities, but should also be replicated in rural areas. However, he indicated that the challenge is to send the doctors to work in smaller towns at the district level.
Moving forward, Dr Ravindra Karanjekar, Group CEO, Jupiter Hospitals spoke on the scalability of digital technologies and how government as well as district hospitals can utilise them. He said, “All district and government hospitals are not equipped to get access to software. With hospitals at varied capacities, scalability of digitisation would differ and will be done incrementally. I believe digitisation has the power to change healthcare, though it will take some time.”
Quoting an example of Microsoft’s work in connecting people at the grass root level, Courtois shared an example how a Singapore-based organisation, Ring.MD connects millions of patients and enables quality healthcare across Asia.
“It has a virtual healthcare platform, connecting doctors with over 10 million people across Asia and it also utilises the power of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and makes healthcare more accessible and affordable for people across the region, using technologies like Skype, bots and Cortana. Such collaborations of technologies will help in connecting faster way to people and provide healthcare access,” explained Courtois.
Giving a perspective on how IT is adapted in other sectors and what would be the learning for healthcare, Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India, informed that there is a tremendous transformation after the Digital India initiative, as rural India and the Tier-IV and V cities are getting digitally transformed.
“Microsoft is witnessing the digital transformation happening in rural areas of the country. We have partnered with the governments of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh where the whole combination of the Common Services Centers (CSCs) and tele – medicine is getting digital health across to the villages. A CSC in village helps not only healthcare but it becomes a common place where you get other important facilities like death certificate, and birth certificate,” Maheshwari explained.
Shankar Narang, COO, Paras Hospitals, spoke about the variations in the healthcare market in smaller places like Darbhanga, 150 km northeast from Patna. He said the technology can be a supporter to a extent at such smaller towns but it can also be a obstructor as its acquisition is not cheap. He firmly felt, “We need to adopt a standardised technology across hospitals.”
Narang also mentioned that medical colleges should introduce topics like AI and Watson medical systems in their syllabus so medical graduates learn them early and later disseminate the same as doctors.
In response, Courtois hinted that Microsoft would like to explore further such suggestions in terms of imparting practical training skills for doctors and specified that these are some of interesting ideas to ponder.
Manpreet Sohal, CEO, Global Hospitals, Mumbai and Hyderabad suggested that Microsoft can explore setting up eICUs in small hospitals, as most small cities cannot get access to ICUs and mentioned that it is a huge potential to scale up.
Raising concerns about the e-waste produced in hospitals, Dr Devlina Chakravarty, CEO, Artemis Hospital, informed that though more hospitals are moving towards a totally paperless environment each passing year, the amount of e-waste and hardware is increasing and is a big concern. “Virtualisation could help but at what level is a big question. Hence, so a tech giant like Microsoft which is driving digitisation, should consider this aspect as well and address this issue,” Chakravarty said.
The healthcare CEOs also expressed their concerns and quizzed Microsoft experts for solutions on the security aspects of increasing digitisation, drawing attention to the threat of hacking and data breaches.
“This is one of the areas where Microsoft invests the most,” averred Courtois “Starting with iPhones, OS system, it goes all the way to the cloud and to the services and apps where people interact and download from. We understand and build incredible, in-depth security features and get billions of connections through our enterprise business collected directory. Microsoft has all the ability to prevent and see the signals of the malware coming and it is able to take practical action against at it. So, we have an end- to- end solution and ability to issue the signal’s real time. The users can then monitor, detect, protect well on time of a cyber attack.”
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Further giving the details on cyber security, Maheshwari informed that the concept of prevention is outdated. Explaining, he said that there are only two kinds of organisations: one who knows they are hacked and do something about it and the other who doesn’t know if they have been hacked. He added that the detection and then the response is very important and cited Microsoft’s decade-long experience in cracking cyber crime, leveraged by Interpol. He also mentioned that Microsoft has recently opened Core 7 cyber security engagement centres for defence agencies in Sansad Marg in New Delhi.
Summing up the session, Reddy said, “There is immense data available but the country needs data aggregation and integration. It needs the vision to integrate and put everything together. A tech giant like Microsoft can lead and tell us how it can be done. An integrated mission with a group of like- minded people and a consortium can bring in transformation.”