Reality & Hurdles Of Indian Healthcare Digitization – Part 1

This blog is a neutral analysis in implementation of digitizing the Indian healthcare system. Generally Indian’s imitate everything on US culture from cornflakes breakfast to pizza dinners.So, healthcare is no exception here. There are lot of meeting been conducted and lot of talks going around digitizing the India patient data.

But do they really know what Indian healthcare system is all about?

You can certainly ask me a question “How do I know this?”. My father works as a Office Administrator on department of Tamil Nadu State Healthcare. Yes, I know several doctors involved in the government space. yes I know what is Indian Health Care System is all about. comparing US healthcare standards with Indian Healthcare is a suicide. Surprising that some groups are talking already.

Prevailing Problem with Indian Healthcare:

Although talking about digitizing the healthcare data of the patients in the Indian healthcare environment is important. It is even more important to see how many doctors are available to attend for number of patients?. The saying “Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm” is really a worth mentioning in situation like COVID-19 pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic the doctors from Private/Government hospitals are completely unapproachable for the patients. One such thing happened to this couple Amarpreet and Mandeep Singh in New Delhi. The tweet of Amarpreet Singh shows the ground breaking reality of Indian healthcare system.

Sadly this women lost her father to COVID-19 and Mandeep Singh also lost his father who was asthamatic already.  This is a case study for those who are keen in improving the Indian Healthcare System.

Cases like these are putting the healthcare system of india under scrutiny. The reality is Indian healthcare system is completely fragile for the population it has. Another problem is, healthcare of India is complicated here as Private and Government are both providing services at two different extremes.

Questions raised by this case study:

• How many doctors are created by India in a year?.
• How many staff nurses are created every year in India?.
• How many people leave India to study medicine? and how many of them come back again? compare this against the population of India. That is exactly where the problem is. The ratio of healthcare staff comparing to the population of India has is considerably less. Even in the situation of non-pandemic the healthcare in India is at risk by a large scale.
• Who is more approachable?
• The private hospital or the government? now google says India has almost 10k+ government hospitals and 11k+ private hospitals. Many times for any road accidents private hospital hesitate to admit patients with critical condition. If they’re taken to government hospital they say we don’t have enough infrastructure.
• Even during the time of pandemic why does the government and private hospital don’t work together?.

Before we even talk about digitizing the patient healthcare data and linking them. We should think about the solution to solve the above two problems. If you really think the Healthcare needs to be efficient then we should also think that healthcare for all Indians should be efficient. Meaning data digitization should be priority for both government and private hospital. Instead of concentrating only on private.

Answers and complications:

The fact in India is that there is only one doctor for 1,457 people. This is lower than what the WHO norm that is 1:1000. Because India population is approximately around 1.3 Billion. It is definitely inappropriate to say why it is not possible to have 1 doctor to one person. But it is very certain that we can bridge this gap somehow. I would also want everyone who reads this article to understand that there is a heavy political implication behind this stat. I will explain in the later part.

There are 8,500 nursing institutes in our country from where 3.2 Lac nursing personnel annually pass out. Now this stats is having cultural issue. India is a country where men and women needs to do their respective jobs. This statement is not irrelevant. Can you just tell me how many Male Nurses are there in India?. India has a lot of male population unemployed how many opt for male nursing courses?.

Being a largely populated country, the basic problem of our country is that somehow the various roles involved in a healthcare system is not communicated properly to the Indian students. Because of this students in India are completely unaware of the courses available to choose on the healthcare aspect. According to the Indian students there is only three major division to choose after completing their high school engineering, doctor and commerce.

If you really want to copy the united states kind of healthcare environment in India the first thing indian government need to  look for is to utilize the resource properly. India has a big human power we have a lot of jobs that are missing in the healthcare sector that needs to be filled using these human power. Said that not only Doctors and Staff nurses are a part of healthcare system. This is a common consumption  that every indian citizen has. This mind set needs to be changed.

When is last time a state government hired a MBA graduate for any sector? But healthcare administrative department needs MBA resources.

Did we try online data availability and analysis for Healthcare before?

Before I say this “India is improving in healthcare and all the data are getting digitized with the existing government”. I should say that healthcare digitization was available from the congress period itself as a part of NHM scheme (National Rural Health Mission).

Ever visited this website? IDSP or even aware of what is that?. Specifically for the group who talk about the Indian healthcare system and making data of patient available easily, here is my advice If your not going to understand what  happen with the IDSP you are not going to digitize Indian healthcare at all. 

This is a program initiated by NCDC – National Center for Disease Control. This is very important for India. Before even this existing government took the control. IDSP program was done with great benefit. This is the perfect program organized by Indian government to identify the healthcare epidemic situation.

What is IDSP?

It is Integrated Disease Surveillance Program. This was started during 2004 itself and the data digitization  happened for this during 2008/9 period. Basically the staff nurses of each primary health centers (PHC) of a district will be noting down the cases coming for the hospital and the disease of those patients will be noted first. the reports will be feed  the staff nurse through the website and the data will be recorded.. It is budget of 640Cr.

Now, the NCDC will visit this IDSP segregated data that are uploaded by the staff nurses of each GH and the PHC’s and see if there is any particular area with multiple strange cases of medical abnormalities detected. If any such data is seen then the central government will send a big team to check this issue and see make sure they’re identifying this issue as early as possible. Curious? Yes. Visit this link. https://idsp.nic.in/WriteReadData/l892s/75910552131595312482.pdf Your curiosity will be awakened a lot.

Whomever reads this article now. Tell me what is wrong with IDSP ?. Isn’t IDSP a good feature for a country like India to trace Epidemic?. If so, What such greater measures you know of taken by the government?. Share in your comments.

The next part of this blog will be on why IDSP needs a lot of improvement and what is the struggle behind it. Problems on how Siddha, Allopathy and unani medicine system complicating the indian healthcare system. Problem with Pharmacy and money involved on drugs. Please Stay Tuned.