Manju Goyal, Deputy Director- Patient Monitoring and Life Support Division, Mindray India in an interaction with Express Healthcare talks about the current market trends and technology advancements in critical care
Could you please walk us through the journey of the company so far In India?
Mindray has been observing the Indian healthcare market since their perception. After understanding the customer requirements, buying pattern, competition and healthcare industry growth pattern to a reasonable extent, Mindray decided to come directly in Indian market with direct subsidiary operations as Mindray India in 2007. Since then, Mindray India has been strengthening its base and extending wings across all states and all customer segments and giving a live example of sustainable growth with right mindset and utmost customer satisfaction.
Mindray India believes in simple strategy of “KEEP THE CUSTOMER FIRST, EMPLOYEES NEXT AND FINANCIALS FOLLOWS “and that’s what is making Mindray India special in terms of long-term customer relationship, employee satisfaction and financial growth.
What are the future plans of the company?
Indian healthcare market is recovering very fast from the COVID phase and is showing signs of growth in terms of hospital expansions and new healthcare setups, enabling the growth of healthcare sector faster than estimated, before the COVID phase. We also sense that there is a considerable change in customer buying influences than a traditional one after facing unexpected turbulences during the COVID phase. The customer is now looking at the products and solutions from a different perspective and keeping a futuristic approach and is willing to give due place to healthcare IT. Mindray is quite aligned with this direction and is providing products and solutions which are future-ready and give end- to-end complete solutions.
We are emphasising the need for healthcare IT on various platforms and trying to make the buyers aware of the strength of IT and the solutions it can bring to their daily work-related issues.
Digital healthcare is enabling us to connect two tier 3 cities’ healthcare systems with mainstream healthcare via remote IT healthcare and Mindray is also emphasising on the affordability of such solutions as we believe ‘NO SOLUTION IS A SOLUTION IF ITS NOT AFFORDABLE”.
Can you throw some light on the emerging trends in the critical care market in India?
In India, there is a scarcity of experienced clinicians in tier 2/3 cities as compared to tier 1 cities, but a large number of populations lives in tier 2/3 cities and need and deserve equally good critical care too. The situation needs some solution to bring these critical care experts to a platform to connect with tier 2/3 cities. To solve this persistent issue, we are seeing some great initiatives from many hospitals and expert clinicians that can support these tier 2/3 hospitals’ critical care departments by taking support from healthcare IT. They are virtually getting connected to patient vitals from multiple devices, doing live diagnosis and advice and support the bedside clinicians in decision making. We believe this trend is here to stay and will uplift the critical care quality across India.
How crucial is the role of technology in critical care in India? How scalable it is currently and what else needs to be done as far as its adaptation is concerned?
Information technology can bring a lot of transformation in India’s critical care field and will provide solutions to many underlying problems and will support the healthcare system quite well. Currently, this point needs more and more discussions & debates, and reference sites creations so that the medical industry can overcome the inertia in adapting this as the solution. While we speak about providing easy access to patient data outside the hospital premises, remote accessibility, and remote consultation for better patient outcomes. The second aspect of caregiver benefit also needs to be explained to overcome the hesitation they may have while adopting this technology related to their outside working hours. Mindray has done a thorough analysis on this aspect and designed solutions which are easy to adapt and beneficial for both clinicians and patients.
Can you highlight the crucial role of industry- academia collaboration to strengthen the skill development, training and education in the healthcare sector? Where are we and what else needs to be done?
In the healthcare industry, we face a lack of skilled manpower at almost every level in hospitals be it ICU/OT support staff, nurse, technicians, or expert clinicians. We cannot wait for organic growth in the expertise level of the healthcare team as the Indian healthcare industry is growing very rapidly. In such a situation the industry needs to come forward and support the education programs, skill development programs, CME, and other medical educational activities to strengthen healthcare. Though in India many great organisations pre-exist and doing exceptional work in enhancing the clinical expertise such as ISA, ISCCM, IRC IMA, ASI, TNAI, IAGES, and many more, the industry needs to contribute their bit by supporting such organisations in these educational programs for raising the bar of the Indian healthcare industry. We have come a long way and still have a long way to go as we want to be a healthcare hub for the entire world.