By arohi
Digital Health and Drones in healthcare used to lighten the pressure on healthtech in India
Health workers traveled about 10 hours to reach Luguthang, a popular village at 14,000 feet in Arunachal Pradesh’s Tawang region for COVID vaccine coverage, claimed a report. This may seem tremendous to some of us, but this is a standard day at work for a health worker in the healthcare industry in India, and there are numerous stories of many health workers in India who are making health tech reachable in their way. We know that the accessibility of a vaccine doesn’t translate into accessibility to a vaccine. Accessibility particularly to healthcare depends upon a lot of factors like financial, geographical barriers, and personal limitations. So is the case of some parts of India which are remote due to deprived road connectivity and topographical constraints. Difficult geographical locations can pose severe threats to healthtech accessibility, and with COVID-19 obligatory restrictions, the movement became more difficult. Against the backdrop of disastrous damage done by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is significant to recognize the nuances of digital health and drones in particular for their potential to crack key challenges by using drones in healthcare systems with the case of Northeast India especially. Digital health demonstrates a successful convergence of various knowledge systems through combining era and health for efficient healthcare delivery offerings. COVID-19 brought on restrictions like distancing and traveling regulations and increased drones in healthcare transformation with a primary tilt in the direction of digital health.
Even though it existed earlier than the pandemic in India, it has obtained the specified push at some stage in the pandemic imposed medical emergencies. Research shows that the maximum impactful COVID-19 technology includes patient-facing equipment, which includes online symptom checkers, patient portals, faraway patient tracking tools, and telehealth.
The WHO’s worldwide approach to digital health envisions health outcomes through adopting appropriate, accessible, affordable, scalable, and sustainable person-centric digital health answers to prevent, come across and reply to epidemics and pandemics, to acquire health-related Sustainable Development Goals and the triple billion objectives of WHO’s Thirteenth General Programme of Work, 2019–2023. The World Economic Forum as a part of its Digital Transformation Project has recognized health-tech as one of the industries where introducing digital health and drone services is imperative. This will become all of the greater critical to discuss within the sustained repercussions of the pandemic on already strained health tech structures in our country.
The health tech systems in India suffer from a nexus of problems from affordability to accessibility to insufficient manpower on the ground. In both cases, it’s a symptom of a bigger difficulty of inadequate public expenditure in the healthcare sector. Not the handiest India however the South-East Asian Region plays abysmally low in expenditure on health tech. Another vulnerability is layered in phrases of accessibility via lengthy distances as there are travel fees, staying fees, and lack of wages involved.
Tata Memorial Hospital’s Cancer heat map suggests that regardless of it being positioned in Maharashtra, the bulk of the patients traveled from Bihar, UP, Jharkhand, and West Bengal, which makes the argument of inequitable exceptional healthcare indisputable. As noted by the WHO report, The Health Workforce in India, 59.2% of health workers have been in city regions, in which 27.8% of the populace resides, and 40.8% of health workers have been in rural regions, in which 72.2% of the populace resides.
Digital health addresses the above-noted problems of the era and specializes in the citizen-centric model. A majority of the healthcare offerings are furnished via means of personal hospitals, and digital health is supported via means of the government can resource in health check-ups, tracking, and early identification that may save crucial time.
In addition to this, loss of timely or adequate HRH in rural and remote regions delays interventions which might be fatal in intense cases. Delivery of drugs or collecting samples the use of drones to remedy mobility problems might be life-changing for remote regions. Medical delivery drones in healthcare have an actual capability to remedy persistent transportation challenges, making sure dependable get right of entry to medicines in regions now no longer presently or always reached by ground transportation. For army cases, in the past few years, the usage of drones has multiplied for industry and civil purposes, which include disaster management, images, and mapping.
