By 2030, the very nature of disease will be further disrupted by technology: Dr Kishore Kumar
Dr Kishore Kumar, Founder Chairman & Neonatologist, Cloudnine Group of Hospitals, Bengaluru
The year gone by has been a year of many questions and Healthcare 2030 will be either a developing India or developed India depending upon what measures are undertaken to “fix” the healthcare system.
As healthcare organisations seek to put the consumer at the center of healthcare decision-making some key questions that will drive our 2030 scenarios will be : will healthcare costs increase faster than the system can bear or will the government aggressively demand change, where will most tech-driven innovations originate and who will monetise them, will incumbents or out-of-industry players invest more in (building and/or acquiring) innovation or will incumbents or out-of-industry players invest more in (building and/or acquiring) innovation.
On the public sector front, the neglected public healthcare sector has a lot to catch up and adapt to from the current good practices and learnings such as hand hygiene, sanitising, social distancing, masking which will virtually eliminate our perennial communicable diseases like hepatitis A, typhoid, dysentery, shigella infections including the dreaded killer tuberculosis. If we continue to practice the “trace & treat” the index patient and contacts to stop the spread – the measures taken during pandemic are very basic – but have been ignored for decades/centuries due to lack of public health commitment.
Beyond this, home healthcare is definitely the new-normal and who needs a hospital when you can prevent or treat conditions from the comfort of your home. The demand for remote / home health solutions ranging from tele medicine, home lab, home pharma, home vaccinations and home health monitoring will be an all-time high.
Customers are definitely going to receive personalised health solutions in ways that are integrated seamlessly into their daily lives. All of this will be enabled by data and algorithms and provided within a healthcare system that is organised and regulated in an entirely new way.
By 2030, the very nature of disease will be further disrupted by technology. So disrupted, in fact, that we might have a lot fewer diseases to manage. It will be important that both public and private healthcare make steady progress with the digital and tele-health. We need to continue to practice the “trace & treat” the index patient and contacts to stop the spread – the measures taken during pandemic. We need to rethink traditional care models and create alternative settings for delivering high-quality, safe and personalised care. Only those who act early and fast enough will be able to turn the changes in healthcare into opportunity.