A new report launched by Accenture titled ‘Delivering e-Health in India – Analysis and Recommendations’ focuses on the access to healthcare systems in India as per global and regional standards. The report highlights the current status of the Indian healthcare industry and its growth in the past decade. It identifies that greater healthcare funding cannot guarantee better access to the healthcare facilities, unless accompanied by powerful and innovative interventions to improve the healthcare ecosystem.
While the system has evolved in India over the past 50-60 years, the coverage and service levels of the entire public health ecosystem remains inadequate. Indian healthcare system continues to suffer from underfunding and poor governance which have created significant inequities in providing basic health care. While India’s healthcare expenditure has increased in the past and the government plans to increase the same further to nearly 2.5 percent of the GDP in the 12th five year plan, India has invested less public money in health than most comparable countries. India’s overall health spending does reach 6 percent of the GDP but most of that is private money.
“Our report identifies the importance of shifting from ‘infrastructure focus’ to ‘productivity focus’ to generate corresponding improvements in India’s healthcare access. This can only be achieved if larger fund allocation for healthcare is accompanied by effective and innovative interventions to improve the existing healthcare ecosystem in order to achieve global standards,” said Krishna Giri, managing director, Health & Public Services, Accenture in India He also added, “Comprehensive adoption of Information Technology and digitisation of systems to improve access to these services is central to the success of these projects”.
It is also imperative to note that the comprehensive adoption of Information Technology (IT) practices is central to the success of these recommendations. The adoption of IT in Health Facilities in India has been abysmal at best. While it is definitely a cause for concern, it is imperative to understand the various drivers and roadblocks of health IT adoption in India, in order to ensure the successful implementation of the recommendations made in this report.
The report proposes five key measures that Accenture believes will have the most significant impact on improving healthcare access in India:
1.Implementing hospital information systems and records digitisation: Hospital Information System is the Health IT systems recommended to improve delivery of healthcare services to the public. It is an integrated system designed to manage the administrative, financial and clinical aspects of a hospital and its services.
2.Automation of supply chain: Supply chain management system for drugs, vaccines and other consumables, along with equipment and other hard assets, is the cornerstone of all successful healthcare systems. The most critical components of the same are cold chain and logistics systems.
3. Empowering Citizens through Information Dissemination: A citizen portal would aim at providing information and services transparently to public with the vision to enhance the citizen’s experience. Citizen portal implementation would lead to Better Messaging, Greater Efficiency, and Improved Citizen Engagement.
4.Handheld based data collection: Given the limitations of providing hard IT infrastructure in the vast reaches of rural India, it is proposed that handheld based data collection modules would result in significant advantages.
5. Analytics-enabled real time disease surveillance: With real time surveillance costs, and ‘time-to-reaction’ are significantly lowered, leading to not only economic savings, but a much more efficient outbreak intervention mechanism as well.
The recommended interventions will have a potential impact throughout the patient life cycle in the healthcare system. They can address several inefficiencies in the healthcare value chain in India, and provide increased healthcare access to citizens, without significantly increasing the spending on the same. While most of these proposed interventions have either been rolled out, or envisaged in parts of India, the implementation, almost always, has been partial or incomplete. What seems to be required is a whole-hog approach to the country-wide rollout of these interventions, failing which, the real benefits may not be fully realised.