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By Arjit Gupta
Technology has quickly proliferated the healthcare space and there is no shortage of innovations and modernization in everything from modes of payment, diagnostic, monitoring and treatment tools. While recent years have seen tremendous growth in healthcare management and technology, the truth remains – humanity is the basis of patient management and care. Technology and humanity are two peas in a pod and heavily dependent on each other for revolutionary changes to occur in the field.
AI-enabled health trackers, portable diabetes checker, movement sensors, virtual monitoring devices as well as advanced robotics in the surgical ecosystem have heightened patient experience indefinitely. However, the contemporary hospital not only requires artificial intelligence and cloud management, but also personalized caretaking and comfort provided by doctors and nurses.
Human-to-human connection in healthcare has been present since time immemorial; it established a sense of trust and reliance between the patient and caregiver. However, machine-based care cannot manifest the same sort of interconnection. While it enables the patient to have a greater degree of comfort and experience lesser pain as compared to manual procedures being done, the level of trust and comfort that comes from a human connection is lost.
In India, private healthcare suffers from distrust and doubt due to precarious record management and inaccessibility. This often occurs due to a shortage of resources and inadequate infrastructure. Alongside, great hospital experience and humane treatment were often limited to big hospitals in tier-1 cities.
Changing healthcare to be humane and tech-driven
While the problems are multifarious, there are several solutions to make healthcare more humane. For instance, there are several organizations that help improvepatient experience and smooth hospital stays laced with personalized care and stay. They achieve this by employing a strategy of co-branding where they collaborate with small-scale/ mid-level hospitals or individual clinics to form a branded chain. The uniformity and technological advancement that such a partnership sees enable the standalone hospitals to make themselves visible in a crowded ecosystem and guarantees increased patient care due to advanced backend technology and resources. These proprietary technologies thereby facilitate the hospitals to provide treatment at lower costs, ensure better experience while maintaining high-quality standards of medical procedures.
Further, technologies implemented by asset-light models assist in creating excellent infrastructure management and help furthering hospital networks. The idea being that having standardized care, over a large network of hospitals and healthcare centers allows patients to access consistently great treatment and care, regardless of the hospital they visit.
Another aspect is to provide the highest quality of medical care along with humane clinical processes at a fixed price. Having a fixed price, not only helps put a patient and their family at ease, but also builds trust between the patient and caregivers. Further, this also helps build a humane bond and shows empathy. A facet that also helps build trust by humanizing the whole process of healthcare is to provide patients with reviews from other patients who have gone through the same procedure or mode of treatment. This not only helps build trust, but shows patients that there is a sense of security in going ahead with a particular type of treatment or procedure. Further, enabling a patient’s family about their progress through technology, essentially using an app, can help build confidence in the transparency of care their loved one is receiving. Alongside, it can aid in making them feel secure in the healthcare process as a whole. This will also help the healthcare workers to monitor the patients even after they get discharged from the hospital.
Lack of empathy in the healthcare domain dehumanizes the patient and creates the impression that they are simply a profit-making commodity. In order to move away from that impression, it is essential that the healthcare industry, as a whole, go that extra mile to ensure patient comfort. Another innovative way to do that is to partner with insurance providers to create an insurance reimbursement service wherein the hospital can help patients convert their insurance reimbursement to a cashless one. This helps alleviate the pressure of upfront payment and ensures they do not skip effective treatment due to monetary issues.
In contemporary times, where technological innovations take place every second, it’s important to retain the human touch in healthcare by combining the boon called technology and the personalized caregiving ability of human beings.
(The author is a Co-founder and CTO, Ayu Health. Views expressed are personal and do not reflect the official position or policy of the FinancialExpress.com.)
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