COVID-19 has accelerated an ongoing shift within the healthcare sector towards the use of digital health technologies (healthtech). Around the world, the pandemic situation has prioritized patient centric remote monitoring solutions and deployment of non-contact technologies.
This is more so in countries like India with poor or uneven healthcare infrastructure, low ratio of healthcare providers to the population, and/or high population density as well as in areas where the population is at high-risk.
Regardless, the adoption of digital solutions and non-contact processes – activated suddenly during the pandemic and sometimes with no alternative – is likely to influence how the healthcare sector evolves long after COVID-19 ends.
As patient familiarity with healthtech increases and their widespread use is forced upon reluctant and willing medical practitioners, the delivery of healthcare is bound to experience significant change.’
In India, COVID-19 has already propelled the practice of telemedicine to the forefront, enabling doctors to examine a multitude of patients via video conferencing tools.
Telemedicine, which specifically refers to remote-based clinical services, comes under the broader segment of telehealth – that is, the distribution of health-related services and information via digital technologies. Telehealth systems allow long-distance patient and clinician contact, care, advice, reminders, education, intervention, monitoring, and remote admissions.
In India, telehealth systems have helped relieve some of the immediate pressures on the country’s overburdened healthcare infrastructure as its COVID-19 cases shot up.
Here we briefly discuss the new regulation on telemedicine and other emerging investment opportunities in India’s healthcare sector.
