In the first part to this series we saw how IDSP functioned. By now, we should appreciate how IDSP was a pro-active measure to identify and isolate epidemic situation in the country even before the corona virus pandemic came to India. This was introduced during the congress government period.

The question we need to ask here is. What are the challenges we faced in digitizing the pandemic situation analysis for India with IDSP?

  1. The staff nurses and the hospital employees needs to manually upload their data periodically in a weekly fashion to upload the patient information to the cloud. The training were not provided properly to the computer users.
  2. loading the reports were prone to manual errors and lot of issues were there in manual reporting. Staff nurses missing to upload the reports on time was also an hectic problem. The first month report loaded on second month delays the government to take action on the right time. Sometimes it is because of the lethargy of the hospital workers using computers. Sometimes its because of the over flooding of patients in hospitals.

When we try to bring in any healthcare digitization in play we need to understand the nuances of the Indian hospital market. How much of the population prefer the private hospital and how many prefer the government hospital?.We cannot take decision to bring the healthcare data to the smart phone of the Indian population when 50% of Indian population is concerned about winning the bread for the day not the health.

How many physicians really know the chemicals used in the tablets which are suggested to the patients?. We as consumers of medicine only think about getting rid of pain and fever. The huge lobby of money happens in the pharmacy industry for India. The manufacturing cost of one tablet is 50% more when it reaches the patient. Why is this an issue for data digitization?

We have two kinds of people in India.

  1. No matter how much the cost is, I want to get my illness solved.
  2. No matter what my illness is, I can take treatment only if you are within my budget.

Unfortunately India has majority of people in the 2nd category than the first one. The people in the 1st category are those who take the “Organic” foods, take membership in cult.fit,  take A1 fresh cow milk, visit huge hospital for normal fever. For them data digitization is much needed. Because these are people who are keen about their health. The 2nd category of people don’t know how diabetes affects them. They don’t care if skipping a meal a day is a problem or not.

So, What is much needed to achieve digitization?. Government needs to take step to encourage people to pay attention towards their health. Government must insist the population that healthcare is very essential. Government need to layout a plan to promote healthcare consciousness to the people. Digitizing the healthcare data has no point if it does not reach the people.

Diabetes disease needs a change of tablets with regular checkup with 3 months once. How many of the people in the 2nd category will go for checkup?. They think about the cost and stay in home and take self medication. So, how can you encourage the 2nd category of people to go to hospital for checkup?. Only one solution. Reduce the healthcare checkup fee. For state/central government employee make it free to do the diabetes checkup. We need to put half the amount on the diabetes tablets. At least then people in the 2nd category think that health is first and money is second.

What is the other problem with data digitization?

Siddha, Unani, Homeopathy medicines are also practiced in huge scale in India. Is there an RxNorm or the NDA code available for the Siddha medicine? Obviously not. There are debates going that Siddha is not a pure medicine at all. The opposite say the same for english medicine.

But it is exceptionally seen that some of the chronic diseases are treated well with siddha medicine and some of the immediate recovery happened in allopathy (english medicine). There is no hospital that I know in India has siddha as a department. But in reality English medicine, siddha, Unani/Homeopathy should co-exist in hospitals.

English medicine and the country medicine practice must combine together to serve the people need. If this merging did not happen  it will be complicated for a country like india to generalize the data. Like how there are dta codes for certain hospitals in USA similarly hospital needs to decide and follow their own coding systems for the medicine prescribed by the non english medicine practitioners. If this does not happen our country will miss a huge population in data digitization. The point is very clear here again. Digitizing the healthcare data has no point if it does not reach the people.

 

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