It is a lucky coincidence that today happens to be the Doctor’s Day as well as the Digital India Day !
We all agree that IT has done wonders to our banking and travel sectors, but IT’s penetration in health care has remained low. Health care is something that concerns us, our parents, our children, and every citizen of India as much or maybe more than online shopping ! Imagine a world where every citizen has a health record, where the doctors have the benefit of intelligent IT systems guiding them about quality treatments, where the labs and medical shops are connected and you don’t have to run around, where you get timely reminders of your children’s immunization and your parent’s follow up visit to their doctors, where the specialist consultation is made easy and accessible even to people living in villages, where you get easy to handle ePrescription and store it in your mobile phone, where devices can be connected to the system and a specialist can monitor patient even remotely, where you get authentic information about your illness and its treatment on your mobile phone from your doctor in your mother tongue (and not have to browse internet and get confused over the information available there), and where accurate data about illnesses is available to make proper policies.
Clearly there is a case for a change, and a big one.
Selling a few copies of a software to a few doctors/labs won’t serve the purpose – it does not create a system. It will have to be something like the ‘WhatsApp’ that everybody in the world seems to have, and therefore can connect with everybody anywhere without spending a paisa! In technical terms this is called EDT (Enterprise Digital Transformation) – transformation of the profession and not just computerization !
We at Center For Behavioural Medicine commit to make the WhatsApp of health care that everyone can have. We, along with our technology partners have a dream to create a Health Grid which will connect all the citizens and health care providers.
On this historic day we take a first step to make the Pune Health Grid a reality – to provide the digital health platform to every doctor and resident of Pune, no city can be a smart city without this! and we hope that every city and village in India gets on this platform in foreseeable future.
Dr. Sanjay Phadke, MD, DPM
Neuroscience Fellow (Germany)