“Technology is turning a game changer in the health insurance scenario”
The potential of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) should be increasingly leveraged for delivering healthcare that is accessible and affordable, experts said on Wednesday.
Panellists at a session on ‘Creating HealthNext' at ‘Connect 2010' hosted by the CII pointed out that while the country was beginning to see the benefits of adoption of IT in the distribution of smart cards and expanding the reach of medical expertise through telemedicine, technology was set to play a more critical role in healthcare.
Somil Nagpal, World Bank health specialist, South Asia Region, said technology was turning a game changer in the health insurance scenario, and most notably, India was showing the world the way to develop these applications.
The key aspect of technology adoption in an insurance programme of scale in a country such as India was the enhancement of value of the money pool, Mr. Nagpal said. Technology had been able to plug leakages and fraud while keeping the transaction costs minimal, he said.
Pointing out that in a short span of about six years, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority had a built up a repository of 100 million electronic medical records, Mr. Nagpal said the database analytics could help introduce better insurance products.
M. Kamatchi, adviser, Tamil Nadu Health Systems Project, said the success of the Kalaignar Insurance Scheme for Life Saving Treatments that now involved 800 major surgeries and disbursal of Rs.2.50 crore as insurance claim every day, could be attributed to the adoption of intelligent healthcare information system.
Sangita Reddy, Executive Director, Apollo Hospitals, said the technology-driven healthcare model of the future would undergo a paradigm shift from the symptomatic to the predictive where mobile phones could be used for health parameters monitoring and warning alerts.
R. D. Thulasiraj, Executive Director, Aravind Eye Hospitals, recounted how technology was leveraged to address the three key factors of accessibility, affordability and inadequate capacity of expertise that was responsible for blindness prevalence.
The outreach strategies ranged from setting up IT-enabled vision centres for every 50,000 of the population, telemedicine consultation and even mapping patient locations to study the areas where ophthalmology services were lacking, he said.
Chairing the session, Preetha Reddy, Managing Director, Apollo Hospitals, said the future of healthcare delivery would increasingly be dictated by technology advances.
Earlier, ICT industry leaders from Taiwan outlined brand promotion plans for India at a session chaired by Gopal Srinivasan, CMD, TVS Capital Funds.
Wayne Wu, Deputy Chairman, Taiwan External Trade Development Council, said reliability, innovation and worthiness were the key attributes of Taiwan prowess in IT manufacturing.
Alex Huang, Country Manager, ASUS (India), said the company planned to expand share in Indian market with innovation as key differentiator.
Rajesh Agarwal, Director, Micro Max Technologies, said the “Taiwan Inside-India Outside” model it shared with Taiwan chipset maker MediaTek was a defining aspect of the company's growth story from a software and e-commerce enterprise to a telco that now sold over a million handsets a month.
Gary Yang, Managing Director, D-Link Corporation and Tony Yang, Managing Director, MSI India, participated.
Comments:
Technology is master you reach diseaster faster. The need of the time is not only the technology but the know-how and the training and the utility of the technology too. In 21th century still patient dies even we have technology in hand due to medical error. One patient is been harmed in 10 in developed country but for India no proper statistics are available???
I am not againt technology but it should be in the safe hands, it should be adaptable with proper training and oreintation. Avation is a good example. If avatation is safe why not the medicine ??