PM SHRI GOVERNMENT SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL KUSHAK
PRADHAN MANTRI SCHOOLS FOR RISING INDIA
Healthcare has become one of India’s largest sectors, both in terms of revenue and employment. Healthcare comprises hospitals, medical devices, clinical trials, outsourcing, telemedicine, medical tourism, health insurance and medical equipment. The Indian healthcare sector is growing at a brisk pace due to its strengthening coverage, services, and increasing expenditure by public as well as private players.
India’s healthcare delivery system is categorised into two major components - public and private. The government, i.e., the public healthcare system, comprises limited secondary and tertiary care institutions in key cities and focuses on providing basic healthcare facilities in the form of Primary Healthcare Centers (PHCs) in rural areas. The private sector provides the majority of secondary, tertiary, and quaternary care institutions with a major concentration in metros, tier-I, and tier-II cities.
The contemporary healthcare sector comprises three fundamental facets, namely services, products, and finance. It can be further subdivided into numerous sectors and categories and relies on interdisciplinary teams of highly skilled professionals and paraprofessionals to address the healthcare requirements of both individuals and communities.
Services of Health Care
Doctor care: A doctor may visit a patient at home to diagnose and treat the illness(es). He or she may also periodically review the home health care needs.
Nursing care: Nursing care may include wound dressing, ostomy care, intravenous therapy, administering medication, monitoring the general health of the patient, pain control, and other health support.
Physical, occupational, and/or speech therapy: Some patients may need help relearning how to perform daily duties or improve their speech after an illness or injury. A physical therapist can put together a plan of care to help a patient regain or strengthen use of muscles and joints.
Medical social services: Medical social workers provide various services to the patient, including counseling and locating community resources to help the patient in his or her recovery.
Care from home health aides: Home health aides can help the patient with his or her basic personal needs such as getting out of bed, walking, bathing, and dressing.
Homemaker or basic assistance care: While a patient is being medically cared for in the home, a homemaker or person who helps with chores or tasks can maintain the household with meal preparation, laundry, grocery shopping, and other housekeeping items.
Future of Health Care
The future of Indian health would be driven by a personalized, digitized, and preventative model of care delivery. Health will be redefined as a holistic condition of overall well-being that includes mental, social, emotional, physical, and economic well-being. The advancement of new technology and discoveries, as well as unique combinations of existing ones, would act as driving forces to move India's current health ecosystem towards a redesigned future of health.
India’s health ecosystem is highly fragmented and as such, establishing a digital health ecosystem is difficult. The country is already burdened with the mammoth task of meeting the ever-increasing health care demands of the most disadvantaged segments of the population. The country has taken a few steps towards digitalizing the health ecosystem. However, gaps in implementation still exist, due to various reasons such as lack of infrastructure, language barriers, and socioeconomic status. Attempts to progressively digitalize health care services in the absence of a solid digital inclusion plan may exacerbate inequities in the Indian economy.
One of the system’s key areas of growth in recent years has been in telemedicine. Apollo was considered a pioneer about 20 years ago when it participated in a pilot project with the Indian Space Research Organization that connected its hospital in Chennai with a small village about 300 kilometers away. Other hospitals began experimenting too, but connectivity wasn’t optimal and cost was a big issue. Since then, of course, connectivity has greatly improved and costs have dropped. Now, almost all hospitals in India practice telemedicine in some form — and the variety of those forms has expanded.
