Moderated by Joy Chakraborty, Chief Operating Officer, P D Hinduja Hospital, Dr. O.P.Yadava, Chief Executive Officer, National Heart Institute, Sameer Mehta, Executive Vice Chairman, Dr Mehta’s Hospital, Dr. Rajendra Patankar, Chief Executive Officer, Jupiter Hospital, P Hari Krishna, Executive Director, Medicover Hospitals and Dr. Shreekant Saptanekar, Medical Director, Godrej Memorial Hospital.
Initiating the discussion on day two of the 10th edition of Healthcare Leadership Forum (HLF) Joy Chakraborty, COO, P D Hinduja Hospital, said, “For the past couple of decades Indian healthcare has gained momentum and it has been possible only by technology adoption. With this technology, adoption has made healthcare patient-friendly, accurate, and most importantly patient-centric.
Even during the pandemic, our healthcare domain has shown a robust response although we struggled initially our human resource – doctors, nurses, and other industry stakeholders like manufacturers have contributed tremendously.”
Speaking about COVID-19 management and how technology is used in patient care, Dr. Rajendra Patankar, CEO, Jupiter Hospital, said, “Adopting technology has increased considerably during the pandemic, now patients are now opting more virtual consultations. Daily clinical briefing of inpatients relatives is helping a lot. The behavior pattern towards technology by the patients is changing, even e-payments in hospitals are increasing.”
Giving a view on the important changes the pandemic has brought in the healthcare sector, Dr. Shreekant Saptanekar, Medical Director, Godrej Memorial Hospital, said,”Medicines were available online but after pandemic with more discounts many oped for it. Many are going for online consultation and webinars attended by doctors will be one to two percent is now increased and they are more attuned to it. Laboratory reports are being sent online, remote monitoring of patients is accepted more.”
Answering the question what is your view on technology acceleration and implementation during and post Covid-19, P Hari Krishna, Executive Director, Medicover Hospitals, “Technology adoption is faster in our hospital our day to day monitoring as become virtual and more analytical with a lot of data analysis is done remotely.
An activity like OPD consultation, pharmacy prescription everything has become paperless. COVID-19 helped us to convince the consultants and others to get onto the e-platform in a holistic way. We have internally developed a teleconsultation platform and we did 3000 consultations during peak pandemic days and now we do 500 consultations a month. An Artificial Intelligence (AI) programming for our camera where employees are tracked for attendance. The technology was anyhow coming but pandemic helped us to prepone tow to three years before.”
Commenting on how the attitude towards technology has changed amongst healthcare stakeholders, Dr. O. P. Yadava, CEO, National Heart Institute, said, “Technology was earlier seen as an option in the healthcare domain but now it is mandatory. It was seen as a cost-efficiency tool but now it’s now looked upon as technical importance as far as efficiency, delivery of services, and its a safety tool for medical professionals and patients. AI-based tools bettered the communication towards patients, hospital staff, and it has helped the hospitals governance the dashboards help them to personalize the rapport.”
Giving his thoughts on how COVID-19 has nurtured the future innovators, start-ups in healthcare, Sameer Mehta, Executive Vice Chairman, Dr Mehta’s Hospital, said, “Every industry as increased their technology adoption, automation, and digitization during the pandemic. A lot of start-ups got initiated it’s the best time for innovation and to reinvent. The reality is it accelerated the speed of progress, startups also saw the opportunity and gave you good innovative products. The challenge tougher to evaluate the new technology as it needed integration.”
Informing on how the hospital ensures to retain the non-COVID patients flow to the hospital and how technology is helping in this strategy, Patankar, said,”We have one set of building set-up in the initial phase of the pandemic we had a tough time. We had to take the help of technology to harness benefits.”
Talking about the what are the global lessons from the western counterpart particularly post covid vaccination, Hari krishna, said,” During peak pandemic on June, which was the period of webinar era 9000 doctors registered across 14 countries to share the detection, treatment, and diagnostics of COVID-19 experience by us. We are way ahead in COVID-19 management in treatment, disinfection, and sanitation aspects.”
Making healthcare deliverable, affordable for the community, Saptanekar, said, “We are a private trust hospital are our target population is middle class and lower middle class. From November we started OPDs the response has been consistent.”
Commenting on how the Indian healthcare delivery system used technology to handle this pandemic in a better way, Mehta said, “Firstly it would have been good if we would have had the telemedicine standards earlier, but thanks to the government who immediately took it up in first six months with a lot more clarity. The second is if we would have a better insurance processing system with clarity on the insurance gateway it will help.”
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