Filling primary, preventive, and predictive care delivery gaps in India by reimagined ‘phygital’ health ecosystem

Dr Swadeep Srivastava Co-Founder & President, of India Health Link (IHL), said, “Despite being home to over 70% of Indians, rural and non-metro areas face a significant shortage of high-quality diagnostic services, especially preventive diagnosis. And we wish to promote preventive care culture to reduce the NCD burden in India by enabling doctors’ clinics, nursing homes, corporate workplaces, and communities across India with this ‘phygital’ ecosystem – health Pod (‘hPod’). We believe that this ‘phygital’ ecosystem, can address the gaps in primary and preventive healthcare delivery, and simultaneously fill them, making it feasible, affordable and accessible to all Indians irrespective of their socio-economic status.”

 Dr Goel further elaborates on the three-prong approach to how the ‘phygital’ ecosystem of IHL is going to fill the primary, preventive, and predictive healthcare delivery gaps in India.

First, the IHL ‘phygital’ ecosystem complements corporate wellness by filling a massive gap in preventive health screening. Recently, we have seen that due to the lack of preventive screening culture in the Indian healthcare ecosystem, many young professionals associated with corporates have succumbed to cardiac arrest. A Marsh India report reveals that 59% of employees in India are stressed in everyday life. In the absence of preventive screening, it is often too late for employees when they discover the stemming medical conditions that have led to non-communicable diseases (NCDs).

Second, the IHL ‘phygital’ ecosystem is turning out to be patient-friendly as it saves time and money the patients used to spend on traditional diagnosis because, in modern healthcare, the role of early detection and correct diagnosis cannot be overstated. About 70% of all clinical decisions are taken based on diagnostic tests, which require a highly evolved digital platform. To overcome the screening hurdles, the health Pod is being installed in doctors’ clinics and nursing homes to make the preventive screening services feasible and accessible followed by an instant report.

And third, the IHL ‘phygital’ ecosystem is turning out to be a boon for community settings, especially for rural India, because a significant proportion of India’s population (~70%) lives in rural areas where screening is seldom carried out. In rural India, 12% of major illnesses remain untreated mainly due to the unavailability of diagnostic facilities and the ‘Phygital’ ecosystem helps in getting easy access to preventive screening. Today, nearly 60 per cent of all deaths in India are due to NCDs. ^[4] One of the underlying reasons for the upsurge of NCDs is the lack of preventive and predictive screening. But the IHLs ‘phygital’ ecosystem is poised to fill the massive gap by providing a cost-effective screening facility followed by an instant report delivery mechanism.

What differentiates IHLs Health Pod from its counterparts is its unique ‘phygital’ ecosystem. The blending of the physical and digital models has made ‘phygital’, making it portable and user-friendly. This ‘phygital’ model seems to be promising from the Indian perspective as it will be instrumental in filling the emanating preventive and primary healthcare delivery gaps in India.