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IT investment planning is very crucial and can help business growth. Any IT deployment or implementation should enable medical professionals to treat a larger audience and expedite the treatment process. Any innovation would be successful if it absorbed a larger user base and made it more affordable. This calls for significant structural changes related to funding pattern
The Indian IT industry has been making concerted efforts to drive innovations across verticals. The pricing of innovative solutions and services has been structured to suit Indian needs based on international standards. However, some IP driven product innovations have turned out to be an expensive proposition, despite technology vendors pushing them hard in the Indian market.
Health care is one sector experiencing shortcomings in the field of absorbing state-of-the-art technologies. Health care players find that the most vital reason for this is the exorbitant cost involved in conducting research-- because technological support proves costly.
Where are the challenges?
Historical data says that a wide range of equipment, technology and IT tools utilised in hospitals around the country were conceived for western-style health care systems. The spiralling costs of technology however were supported by the third party insurance provider and higher affordability by patients.
The Indian situation is quite the opposite. Two vital challenges are access to quality providers and high out-of-pocket costs, which keep western-style solutions out of reach for a majority of the population. Lack of insurance coverage also pushes patients towards less-advanced-but-lower-cost treatment. While these are significant issues, they also present exciting innovation opportunities for innovators. Fundamentally, different ground conditions in India offer a huge opportunity for innovation for mass impact in health care.
An example would clarify this: lets take the case of breast cancer screening. In India, less than 1 per cent of the target women population is screened, leading to over 80 per cent of cancers being detected in advanced stages.
Be more Innovative
While several successful business innovations already exist in India, the tragedy is that many of these have not been popularised to set as examples. Some good examples in this direction are Shankar Netralayas eyecare services, Narayana Hriudayalayas low-cost cardiac surgeries, Thyrocares diagnostics service etc.
Whats missing is highlighting how technology has complemented business innovations and breakthroughs. We need more innovations, such as the hearing aid revolution in Africa, where inventors profitably reduced the cost of hearing aids by making a novel one-size-fits-all design (advanced systems require fine tuning for individual users); and by freely licensing the product designs to franchisees at small profits.
Similar examples must be emulated in India to use technology to make health care more popular. What is required is a multi-disciplinary and entrepreneurial approach towards addressing these challenges from the ground-up. Most breakthrough technical innovations take place only after a strong business context has been defined.
Innovation must be a market-led activity, where we first need to evolve unique business and service models to address unique Indian conditions. Most successful Indian companies know that it is a lot easier to make a Re 1 margin over 500 million customers than a Rs 1,000 margin over 10 million.
Get over Innovation Bottlenecks
It is critical for IT managers in health care to find ways to overcome innovation bottlenecks. IT investment planning is very crucial and can help business growth. Any IT deployment or implementation should enable medical professionals to treat a larger audience and expedite the treatment process. Any innovation would be successful if it absorbed a larger user base and made it more affordable. This calls for significant structural changes related to funding pattern.
~ Deepam Mishra is CEO of I2India and Technovate India.
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