COUNTRY REPORT: INDIA
Indian hospitals forced to go digital as elective admissions dwindle Amid the pandemic crisis, India’s digital health market is now surging, with hospitals and clinics now scrambling to reach and serve patients through a wide range of online channels.
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hen India rolled out the world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown in March last year, an eerie silence immediately descended upon Apollo Hospitals’ network of medical facilities. The company, which runs India’s largest collection of private hospitals, watched as its patient foot traffic vanished almost overnight. Luckily, Apollo Hospitals had launched a new telemedicine platform just one month before the pandemic struck. “The greatest shift in the pandemic has undoubtedly been toward digital health - customer adoption has skyrocketed,” noted Shobana Kamineni, executive vice-chairperson of India’s Apollo Hospitals. “In India, 50 million people accessed healthcare online from March 2020 to May 2020, with 80 percent of all telemedicine users and patients using it for the first time.”
The greatest shift in the pandemic has undoubtedly been toward digital health - customer adoption has skyrocketed
The COVID-19 pandemic has driven the growth of healthcare innovation to historic levels. “We started ‘Apollo 24/7’ (the network’s telemedicine offer) in February 2020, just a month before the lockdown took place in India. We already knew before the pandemic that we could never live just in the physical world— but during the pandemic we had to (be agile and) turn on a dime. “Without something like this, hospitals across the world would have lost so much money because the beds are empty,” she said, speaking at a virtual congress organised by McKinsey & Company. The doctor is in the app Apollo Hospitals’ experience is just one example of the digital healthcare boom that has swept India in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. “COVID and the new normal saw
How well did Indian hospitals acclimatize to this change in the healthcare environment?
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HEALTHCARE ASIA
healthcare companies adopt new ways of working. Globally and in India, there has been a massive expansion of telemedicine and digital health applications,” noted Satyam Mehra, partner, Bain & Company New Delhi. “eSanjeevani, the telemedicine service of the Health ministry crossed 1 million teleconsultations in December 2020. Similarly, the private networks like Practo, Mfine and the hospital apps themselves have seen tremendous traction during this period,” he added. A recent survey by EY and Imperial College London showed that healthcare organisations in India had among the highest adoption rates of digital technologies in 2020, with over half or 51% of respondents saying that they had increased their use of digital technologies and data solutions since the outbreak of the pandemic. “The response to the COVID-19
