The first Covid-19 wave that swept India in early 2020 was for Dr Sangram Kapale and his colleagues a grueling experience.
“The kind of mental pressure that we’ve all been through is very difficult to put into words,” he says.
“It was about saving lives with minimal resources. We lacked medicine, beds, oxygen.
“The lack of qualified workers, such as B. paramedics, was another problem. We were forced to hire medical students who had no hands-on experience dealing with patients.”
dr Kapale ran an 800-bed temporary Covid treatment center in Pune, Maharashtra. The center was overflowing with patients and concerned family members gathered outside.
“On the one hand we have done everything in our power or beyond to fight Covid and save lives and on the other hand we have been accused of neglect by loved ones because they did not know what was going on inside .”
Much of the chaos at the time was due to a lack of resources, according to health workers. Before the pandemic, India had one of the lowest levels of public health spending in the world.
In 2019, healthcare spending represented just 1.5% of India’s gross domestic product (GDP). For comparison, China spent 6.7% of its GDP on health in 2019 and the UK spent 10.2%.
Since then, the Indian government has increased spending and has a target of spending 2.5% of GDP on health by 2025.
Some hope the devastating impact of the pandemic has been a turning point for India’s entire healthcare system, with a future focus on technology and innovation.
“All aspects of access to healthcare, diagnostics and life sciences are moving…toward low-cost and high-tech,” says Akriti Bajaj, an analyst specializing in healthcare at Invest India, a government agency that encourages investment.
It is believed that there are more than 6,000 startups in the Indian healthcare sector, one of which is Dozee. The company’s technology involves the use of a smart sensor under a patient’s bed sheet on a hospital bed.
It tracks the micro-vibrations generated by the body as the heart pumps blood and tracks a patient’s breathing and other movements. These observations are then translated into data and processed by artificial intelligence-based algorithms that, if anything unusual is detected, can alert nurses and doctors at a central monitoring station.
The company aims to have its technology installed in more than 1,000 hospitals and 5,000 beds by the end of 2022.
“Our idea was to simplify the whole thing [monitoring] process, make it more patient-centric, and bring the technology to the wards and even to the patients’ homes,” says the company’s founder, Mudit Dandwate.
Mr Dandwate believes technology could improve the quality of healthcare across India.
“In India, the crumbling health infrastructure has been laid bare [by Covid] – poor hospital infrastructure; acute shortage of doctors; Nursing staff and equipment and specialized treatment facilities, particularly in primary care centres, in rural areas.
He says government spending on healthcare has increased over the past two years, and both the public and private sectors will scale up their facilities in the coming years – with technology playing a “key role” in that transformation.
Another health tech entrepreneur, Dr. Geetha Manjunath founded Niramai in Bangalore in 2016. She wanted to improve cancer screening, especially among young women.
“Unlike in Europe and the US, where early detection is made possible by regular, systematic screening programs, India sees a high mortality rate due to late-stage detection,” she explains.
dr Manjunath says that in India more than half of breast cancer cases occur in women under the age of 50 and traditional x-ray detection has poor accuracy in this group.
So her company developed a technique to detect early breast cancer using a small, handheld screening device.
A high-resolution thermal sensor is used to measure temperature variations on the patient’s chest, AI then analyzes these 400,000 temperature points to create a report and flag abnormal regions.
Thermal imaging is easy to use, meaning the test can be performed by less-skilled health workers working in more remote areas of India.
dr Manjunath says the device makes a more systematic screening program feasible, and that earlier detection could in turn reduce treatment costs and save lives.
So what do doctors think of the new technology emerging on some wards?
dr Manjunth HG, Head of Anesthesia Unit at KR Hospital in Mysore, has used Dozee’s system. He says that while the technology is useful, he believes it has its limitations.
“AI still has a long way to go, while it helps the medical community in great ways, it can never replace humans. Even if AI is helpful, we need doctors and human presence in intensive care units and hospitals to help us.”
Back in Pune, Dr. Sangram Kapale is only relieved that after a second, devastating Covid wave in 2021, a national vaccination program appears to have brought the virus under control for the time being.
“After the vaccinations, the severity of the disease has definitely reduced.
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