Telemedicine in India: Challenges and solutions

Abstract

India being the 2nd most populated country with over 1.35 billion people, the demand for access to health-care along with the basic amenities has been significantly increasing. Approximately 75% of India's population, i.e., 926 million Indians reside in rural villages, small towns & cities across the country which lack the basic health-care infrastructure, need doctors who are generally based out of metropolitan cities. The situation is grim for 620 million Indians, who reside in the rural regions, lack access to basic health-care facilities. India's health-care industry has been growing at an ever-increasing pace and is projected to grow 17% by 2020. This growth has been fuelled by improved health-care policies by the government, increased coverage and penetration of internet and technological breakthroughs. The overall size of Indian health-care market by 2022 is expected to increase to Rs. 8.6 trillion. The government of India also plans to increase public health spending to 2.5% of the country's GDP by 2025iv . The quality of health-care industry has improved to a large extent due to technology and led to emergence and establishment of many MedTech start-ups and offerings in India. But the opportunities are unequally distributed and not accessible across all the demographics of the entire country. The shortage of health-care personnel, inadequate public health-care infrastructure, disproportionate distribution of health-care facilities between urban and rural areas are some of the reasons for this disparity. As per US based CDDEP report, more than 65% of health-care in India is beyond the reach of general population. While exorbitant costs of health-care service alone prove to be a deterrent, combined with the lack of access to health-care due to unavailability of doctors and infrastructure in rural areas compounds this deternace. Thus, there is a need for Indian healthtech startups to address this challenge by leveraging technological advancements in Analytics ,ML, IoT, etc to revolutionise the industry. The major drawback that Indian health-care service are dealing with is non-availabaility of health-care data. At present, the collection of health-care data in India is less than 5%. Thus, these challenges can be looked upon as lucrative opportunities by the HealthTech startups which can be solved through the use of data collection & processing using AI, ML, IoT. Many start-ups today are trying to solve the problem of 'health-care coverage', which is the biggest hurdle for a country like India. Advanced analytics, big data, AI & ML are expected. transform the Healthcare sector in the near future with the entry of MedTech startups foucussed on solving 'health-care coverage' issue. As part of this study, we have tried to focus our attention towards the advancememnt of the field of TeleMedicine, used case examples of its success stories within India and among its developing peers, how traditional challenges associated with health-care domain is being tackled by it and how it helps in mitigating the potential impact on health-care ecosystem fueled by disruption like Covid-19 pandemic.