WHY THE WORLD CAN NOW LOOK TOWARDS INDIA FOR ANSWERS IN HEALTHCARE?

Countries around the world have realised that economic growth is not sustained until their populations are healthy and productive. Economic Growth is often lost by families and individuals through expenditure on Healthcare planned or catastrophic

- Arun Kumbhat

The current inequity and challenges of access that the majority of populations face is largely due to a broken down healthcare continuum, which is particularly disadvantageous to the lower income and marginalized populations.

This realisation paved the way for the inclusion of Universal healthcare into the Sustainable Development Goals framework with an aim to make healthcare accessible and equitable to all people.

In a broader perspective, 13 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals are linked to better health for people, which underlines the importance of the concepts of Universal Healthcare and OneHealth.

Why Digital Health?

This calls for semantic interoperability between; not only the vast numbers and varied archetypes of providers, payers, patients and managers within healthcare, but also eventually between the various adjacencies and determinants of healthcare like Food and Agriculture, Environment, Sanitation and Hygiene, Water, Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Infrastructure and so on.

Nations can no longer merely react or respond to healthcare challenges but must aim for Wellness through, Predictive, Preventive and care and promoting Health Seeking behaviours in order to keep universal healthcare sustainable. Recent events like the CovId-19 have underlined the importance of epidemiological intelligence and disease management at speed and scale. Covid was certainly not the last public health challenge that populations will face, going forward.

Clearly leveraging Digital Technologies are key to making this giant orchestra of stakeholders produce the symphony of wellness and care, as they must now perform with realtime synchronicity.

Given that, India is a great potential exemplar for nations in the Global South that are keen to nurture healthier and more productive populations.