Inaugural Session – Dr Neena Pahuja,Director General, ERNET, India

  • 24-03-2015 04:47:38
  • Health

We still have very few hospitals which have got recognised due to some of the problems faced by the healthcare industry. However, we all have heard about IT helping healthcare.

A report by BBC suggests that the death rate has actually gone down by 17 percent among emergency patients, which means 16000 deaths are preventable in a hospital. The number of footfall in AIIMS is very high. One of the systems implemented in AIIMS also has facilities of ensuring that medication energy can be tracked. Reduction in medical error is also there. It is reduced by half.

We always talked about not enough doctors in India. Now, we are talking about opening a large number of medical colleges. We have 1.4 doctors per 1000 population, which is rarely low. Further, patient to hospital bed ratio is 0.9 per 1000 in the country.

We have 1.4 doctors per 1000 population. Can technology help in increasing the ratio in the next 10 to 15 years? Can we electronically transfer the data of patient to a place where it can be analysed? We as a team have to think of solutions to improve the situation.

Also, during pregnancy there are many women who are unable to reach the hospital for regular checkups. We have seen a system wherein people come to your house and take the blood samples. The concept of mobile X-rays, mobile ECGs is a part of diagnostics, which can actually send the data to cloud which can further be analysed over a period of time.

We cannot take the hospitals to the patients, but we can take some of the diagnostics to the patients who are unable to travel. Digital India, one of the initiatives started by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also a great help in the healthcare domain.

The world is changing, and through a part of the Digital India Initiative, we are preparing ourselves to be ready for this new changing world.

Years ago, the e-commerce projects were being established. Some of them worked, some did not. However, today e-commerce is working so well and making money because now we are ready from the connectivity point of view.

We have Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of places. What we do not have is something which is one cloud of data of patients. If we have it, we will be able to create lots of drugs very easily. Some tools are there which say that this is the condition, then this should be the medication and the doctor can reconfirm. Artificial intelligence will come in, which will be able to create thousands of doctors.

There is a concept of three Cs: Connectivity, Collaboration and Cloud, which will be taken to medical facilities. Hospitals and healthcare trends are changing. We are also working on ERNET and the national policy of IoT. The data could go by bluetooth, and other protocols. But, if you combine these data coming from a body to sense to a hospital or a doctor or a portal or ambulance, this is how things will go.