India Is Using Technology To Give 1.4+ Billion People Access To Healthcare

India’s vast population of more than 1.4 billion people continues to grow significantly, bringing with it immense opportunity for innovation and disruption. In this regard, world leaders, corporations, regulators, and investors are slowly realizing that India’s prowess in the next 50 years will be unmatched. In fact, Goldman Sachs released a report earlier this month indicating that India is soon likely to become the world’s second largest economy.

With this growth in population, one of the paramount areas of investment which the government has focused on is embracing technology to increase access to quality healthcare.

Providing healthcare services in an affordable, effective and efficient manner is a concept that has become increasingly challenging for most nations across the globe, especially as the cost of care continues to rise and holistic population health continues to decline. India is no different, especially as it grapples with providing cost effective care to a population that is nearly 5 times the size of the U.S.— the majority of which is not even located in large, metropolitan city centers.

This initiative has been top of mind and a firm resolution for India’s latest Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been celebrated as one of the world’s most powerful and influential leaders in recent years. In 2018, PM Modi announced the launch of “Ayushman Bharat,” the world’s largest free healthcare program aimed at providing best-in-class universal health coverage. The program entails two aspects: first, the establishment of Health and Wellness Centers (HWCs) that focuses on the delivery of comprehensive primary and diagnostic care; and second, Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojna (PM-JAY), which provides more than 550 million people with coverage of Rs. 5 lakhs per family, per year, for secondary and tertiary care hospitalizations.

Though this initiative is a gargantuan undertaking, India is fortunate to have some of the world’s best tech talent. A significant aspect of Ayushman Bharat is the digital ecosystem being harnessed to enable its functions. This is more broadly deemed as The Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), which “aims to develop the backbone necessary to support the integrated digital health infrastructure of the country. It will bridge the existing gap amongst different stakeholders of Healthcare ecosystem through digital highways.” Specifically, the vision for the ABDM is “to create a national digital health ecosystem that supports universal health coverage in an efficient, accessible, inclusive, affordable, timely and safe manner, that provides a wide-range of data, information and infrastructure services, duly leveraging open, interoperable, standards-based digital systems, and ensures the security, confidentiality and privacy of health-related personal information.”

The ABDM connects key stakeholders across the healthcare landscape to enable best-in-class healthcare delivery, bringing together healthcare technology companies, government regulators, and care delivery organizations with labs, pharmacies, hospitals, and healthcare providers across multiple domains. The digital architecture has also been intricately designed to carefully link and maintain secure health records while also providing easy user interfaces to access care on a daily basis. In fact, the initiative has landed some of the country’s largest organizations as key partners, including Tata Medical and Diagnostics group and Apollo Hospital.

In May of this year, the National Health Authority of India announced that “Over 100 health programs and digital health applications [have completed] their integration with [the] Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission [ecosystem],” signifying an important milestone for the initiative. “The growing pool of ABDM integrators signifies the collaborative efforts by the health tech innovators from Government and private sector in making healthcare service delivery more efficient, accessible and affordable for all. We look forward to expanding the ABDM partners ecosystem to take the benefits of digital healthcare delivery to the masses. As more and more companies get integrated, we will be able to achieve interoperability in true sense.”

One such program and application that has become immensely popular and widely used is eSanjeevani, the National Telemedicine Service of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) which has actually been recorded as the world’s largest telemedicine program.

The platform operates in two ways: 1) a provider-to-provider service that patients can use after walking into a health and wellness center or that physicians can use to request more specialized clinical advice from other physicians, and 2) eSanjeevani OPD, which directly connects a patient to a provider in the comfort of their own homes.

Of note, the adoption of the program has been widely successful. Since its inception in 2019, the program has already “served more than 114 million patients at over 115,000 Health & Wellness Centres (as spokes) through 15,700+ hubs; and over 1100 online OPDs serviced by more than 225,000 doctors, medical specialists, super-specialists and health workers as telemedicine practitioners.”

Undoubtedly, the Indian government’s efforts in undertaking such a large initiative must be commended, and its entire healthcare playbook is certainly something which other countries can learn from. India is often compared to other Western nations with regards to its healthcare outcomes; however, very few other countries have to reconcile with the scope and scale of a population size similar to India, let alone take into consideration very nuanced cultural, demographic, economic, and social factors. Furthermore, even if compared on a one-to-one basis with consideration of population and demographic factors, healthcare outcomes in India still surpass those of many leading Western nations, especially when taking into account the cost-of-care with regards to the value provided to patients.

Indeed, there is significant promise in India’s relentless efforts to embrace technology and digital innovation to further improve its healthcare system. Although these efforts are certainly still a work in progress and there is still a lot of work to be done, one thing is certain— India is slowly but surely succeeding in becoming a global beacon of ideal healthcare.