Can tech help revive India’s ‘crumbling’ health system?

The first wave of covid-19, which swept through India in early 2020, was an exhausting experience for Dr. Sangram Kapale and his colleagues.

“The kind of mental pressure we were all going through is very difficult to put into words,” he says.

“It was about saving lives with minimal resources. We lacked medicines, beds, oxygen.

“The lack of skilled labor, such as paramedics, was another problem. We were forced to use medical students who had no practical experience handling patients.”

Dr. Kapale was in charge of a temporary Covid treatment center in Pune, Maharashtra, which had 800 beds. The center filled with anxious patients and family members gathered outside.

“On the one hand, we were doing everything in our capacity, or beyond, to fight Covid and save lives, and on the other hand, family members accused us of negligence because they didn’t know what was going on inside.”

Much of the chaos back then can be attributed to a lack of resources, according to health workers. Before the pandemic, India reported one of the lowest levels of public spending on health care in the world.

In 2019, healthcare spending was equivalent to just 1.5% of India’s gross domestic product (GDP). By comparison, China spent 6.7% of its GDP on health in 2019, and in the UK that figure was 10.2%.

Since then, the Indian government has increased its spending and aims to spend 2.5% of GDP on health by 2025.

Some are hopeful that the devastating impact of the pandemic has been a turning point for the entire Indian health system, with a future focus on technology and innovation.

“All aspects of healthcare access, diagnostics and life sciences are moving towards high tech and low cost,” says Akriti Bajaj, an analyst who focuses on healthcare at Invest India, a firm financed by the government that promotes investment.

It is believed that there are more than 6,000 startups in the Indian healthcare sector, one of them being Dozee. The company’s technology involves the use of a smart sensor under a patient’s sheet in a hospital bed.

It tracks the micro vibrations produced by the body when the heart pumps blood and tracks the patient’s breathing and other movements. These observations are then translated into data and processed by AI-based algorithms that, if anything unusual is detected, can alert nurses and doctors at a central monitoring station.

The company wants to install its technology in more than 1,000 hospitals and 50,000 beds by the end of 2022.

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“Our idea was to simplify all the [monitoring] process, make it more ‘patient-centric’ and bring the technology into the wards, and even into patients’ homes,” says company founder Mudit Dandwate.

Dandwate believes the technology could improve the quality of health care in India.

“In India, the dilapidated health infrastructure was laid bare [by Covid] – poor hospital infrastructure; acute shortage of doctors; nursing staff and equipment and specialized treatment facilities, particularly in primary health care centers, in rural areas.

He says that government spending on health care has increased in the last two years and that both the public and private sectors will expand their facilities, with technology playing a “key role” in that transformation, in the coming years.

Another health technology entrepreneur, Dr. Geetha Manjunath, founded Niramai in Bangalore in 2016. She wanted to improve cancer detection, especially in young women.

“Unlike Europe and the US, where early detection is enabled through regular and systematic screening programs, India has high mortality rates due to late-stage detection,” he explains.

Dr. Manjunath says that in India, more than half of breast cancer cases are seen in women under the age of 50, and traditional X-ray screening has poor accuracy in this group.

So his company developed a technique to detect early-stage breast cancer using a small, portable detection device.

A high-resolution thermal sensor is used to measure temperature variations in the patient’s chest, then the AI ​​analyzes these 400,000 temperature points to generate a report and flag any abnormal regions.

Thermal imaging is easy to use, which means the test can be carried out by less-skilled health workers working in more remote areas of India.

Dr. Manjunath says the device makes a more systematic screening program possible, and early detection could, in turn, reduce treatment costs and save lives.

So what do doctors think of the new technology appearing on some wards?

Dr. Manjunth HG, head of the anesthesia department at KR hospital in Mysore, has used the Dozee system. He says that while the technology is useful, in his opinion it has its limitations.

“AI has a long way to go, although it is helping the medical fraternity in a big way, it can never replace humans. Even if AI is useful, we need doctors and a human presence in ICUs and hospitals. So, it’s just a help for us.”

Back in Pune, Dr. Sangram Kapale is relieved that after a devastating second wave of covid in 2021, a national vaccination program appears to have brought the virus under control for the time being.

“After the vaccines, the severity of the disease has definitely been reduced. As a community, we now have to face whatever the future holds.”