Bangalore, July 28, 2017: Philips Innovation Campus, successfully organized their third Digital Healthcare Conclave on July 28, 2017. The conference shed light on why connected healthcare is the need of the hour for our country and how it can solve the existing healthcare problems.
Indian healthcare system has always grappled with 2 As - Accessibility and Affordability challenges. In 2015, there were 25354 Primary Health Center (PHC)s in India and 8.1% of these PHCs were without a doctor. To add to this, 38% of deaths are due to communicable diseases, maternal, per-natal and nutritional disorders, and 42% of deaths are due to non-communicable diseases. This burden will only increase as less than 15% of population is covered by insurance. With all these challenges, one can hear the wheels of Indian healthcare cranking hard and heaving to pull. How do we address this?
While there has been a lot of innovations in healthcare where technology has shown the potential to find solutions, it is important that there is a common roadmap, strategy that would help the ecosystem work in tandem towards relevant solutions.
The challenge
Indian healthcare system is burdened with numerous challenges. While it is seen that innovative solutions using digital technologies have been able to address these challenges effectively, there is a long way to go. Connected healthcare solutions is a key to this. But for this to work, it requires an ecosystem where health data is available to care givers. But India lacks a common health data repository. The PHCs DHCs and CHCs are not connected.
Connected care and AI supported by UIDAI (Aadhaar) could help in addressing these challenges
The National Healthcare Policy 2017, talks about how connected healthcare is the solution to the existing healthcare problems in India. The policy suggests the setting up of a National Digital Health Authority (NDHA) to regulate, develop and deploy digital health across the continuum of care using digital technologies. It highlights the role of Aadhaar to make connected healthcare a reality by establishing a seamless and efficient National Health Information Network.
Philips has been at the forefront of using digital technology in healthcare. Its various connected care solutions have increased accessibility to care in remotest corners of the world, empowered patients to manage their health while also giving health providers tools to improve patient outcomes. With a r mission to touch more than 3 billion lives by 2025, Philips is working towards creating meaningful innovations that will make healthcare accessible to all. Some of these innovations include:
Data Science Platform (DSP)
Healthcare is transitioning from episodic, fragmented care to networked, continuous care which enables population health management, integrating data from disparate point solutions across hospitals, physician practices, insurance and consumer homes. It provides actionable and context sensitive information to clinicians, patients and care givers. To provide analytics for such a wide range, there is a need for a data science platform that has comprehensive capabilities to do analytics on many aspects including analysis on longitudinal data. Philips Data Science Platform is a platform for healthcare analytics meant for data scientists and product development teams to develop analytical models and applications providing a standardized data science platform that ensures seamless development and deployment across healthcare continuum. This Platform empowers healthcare organizations to spend more time understanding their data, freeing them from the responsibility and expense of building, maintaining and deploying data science capabilities in-house. With these advanced analytics and artificial intelligence methods, organizations can rapidly .. create predictive models, optimize operational workflow, and accelerate development of analytics offerings
DSP comes prepackaged with most of the open source tools, frameworks, libraries etc. that data scientists use. DSP comes with a rich set of pertained clinical models for Medical images and clinical reports - that can either be consumed directly within a hospital workflow or by data scientists to build their own custom specific models/apps.
Mobile Obstetrics Monitoring (MoM).
High fetal and maternal mortality rates continue to remain one of the major concerns in the healthcare space. The Philips Mobile Obstetrics Monitoring (MOM) software solution helps community caregivers and doctors work together to identify and manage high-risk pregnancies, bringing care to where it’s urgently needed: primary health centers and patient homes. MOM features a way for community caregivers to capture vital information so that a clinical decision support (CDS) pregnancy risk level can be calculated. This helps standardize pregnancy risk stratification so that high-risk cases are not missed. Mobile applications connect doctor, caregiver, and patient for diagnostic assistance and progress assessment.
A pilot study using MOM is being done in Shorapur Taluk in Yadagir District, Karnataka since December 2016. Philips has partnered with Narayana Health and National Rural Health Mission, Karnataka for this study. Over 1000 women have already been covered under this study.
Chest Pain Clinics (CPC)
While cardiovascular diseases have quadrupled in the last 40 years, 50% of the affected patients arrive too late for appropriate treatment. If the patient receives treatment within one hour of the ‘the golden hour’, possibilities of saving his/her life increase manifold.
Philips Innovation Campus has developed a solution ‘Chest Pain Clinics’ to answer the problem. A Chest Pain Clinic is essentially a clinic or a small healthcare facility that is devoted to the care of outpatients, primarily CAD patients. These CPCs serve as the first point of contact for the patient and are usually run by general physicians or non-interventional cardiologists. The pre-requisite for a CPC is that it should be: Capable of performing ECGs on patient. They are equipped with Philips Efficia ECG 100 an innovative, portable, easy to use ECG machine, with diagnostic quality ECG machine intended for acquisition, recording, measurement, display and printing of simultaneous 12 channel ECG waveforms of patients in ECG room for both in-patient and outpatient.
In this model, CPCs will constitute the spokes for the ‘hub’ hospital. Once a patient arrives at one of the spoke CPCs, the local physician evaluates the patient’s symptoms and, performs an ECG via the Philips Efficia ECG 100. This ECG is wirelessly transmitted to the on-call cardiologist. Once Cardiologist reviews the ECG, he instructs the general physician on the next steps for treatment of patient.
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