Speakers at a session on the digital future of healthcare and sustainability at the digital summit, #FUTURE, said that new technology would make healthcare patient-centric and democratic. Ajit Thomas of Harvard Medical School said that healthcare at present was provider-centric, which was set to change with new technology.
Dr. Thomas added that new technology should make healthcare cost-effective. According to him, Kerala can leverage its smartphone and Internet penetration to provide better healthcare, especially in a scenario where senior citizens constitute a substantial segment of the population. He also said that “individual heroics” by doctors in conventional medical care would give way to virtual teamwork in the future which held up the prospects of Artificial Intelligence and auto-diagnosis.
'Moving towards personalised medicine'
Anuradha Acharya, founder of Mapmygenome, said: “We are moving to an era of personalised medicine thanks to recent breakthroughs. The cost of analysis has come down, and genetic testing, which can help predict and prevent diseases and personalise treatment, is getting cheaper.” She pointed out that though Indians constituted 20% of world population, Indian genetic data formed 0.2%.
Azad Moopen of Aster DM Healthcare spoke on the need to quickly evolve medical care into the new era. “The mode of transport and telecommunication had evolved on the wings of state-of-the-art technologies, but medical care still continues to be what it was, more or less, about 50 years ago. Telemedicine can play a big role in providing cost-effective medical care to the remotest areas,” he said.
Duleep Sahadevan, member of the High Power IT Committee, spoke on the healthcare scenario and how the State wanted to “uberise” healthcare.
