| | February 20189Technologies need adequate usage over time to mature and improve, unless the new and emerging health tech solutions are leveraged, we will never be able to fully address the challenges or move forwardAnjali Awasthiinvolved, complexity of healthcare regulations, restrictions on data flu-idity, possible patient data breaches and process confidentiality issues and many others. Most experts feel, error implications could be high and have thus largely remained risk averse. We need to make our clinical experts more tech skilled if not tech savvy. Skill them with the use of technolo-gy while the tech skills will develop their ability to `find, evaluate, inte-grate, communicate and not hesitate'.Technologies need adequate us-age over time to mature and improve. Unless the new and emerging health tech solutions are leveraged, we will never be able to fully address the challenges or move forward. Besides the clinical experts and innovative tech solution providers, others on this spectrum are patients, insurance and healthcare providers, whose involve-ment is equally important. Patients as recipients trust clinical experts for advice, they now need to be educat-ed to also trust & use technology for their healthcare - to become active consumers - the more we move them towards personalized collaborative interactions with real time care and health management, we will even-tually lead them towards more in-volved healthcare decisions. Patient education and engagement is begin-ning among the urban populace, but with 70 percent Indians in rural India, we have a long way to go. In urban India, doctor patient ratio is still bet-ter and access to facilities is less of a challengeIf we want healthcare consumers to change from `break-fix approach' to `preventive healthcare', health insurance providers can serve as en-ablers, helping in faster adoption of technology by offering plans that also cover the new and emerging `points of care'. Healthcare providers to be-come efficient treatment centers, also need to move from service centricity to patient centricity, designing and offering services that are relevant and easily customizable. This will help connect `words' with `actions' to reduce post purchase dissonanc-es or the `promise gap'. Change in processes, culture and communica-tion will be required, to behaviorally move from `sharing' to `engaging'. It may take some time, but if there is `will' and `skill' available, this should be possible. Moving print, online and social interactions with patients, from preachy non-contex-tual content to communication that is personalized, timely, relevant and responsive should be a good point to start from to improve interfaces. Just changing communication tools will be a quick fix. In a word of mouth driven times, what is really needed is a mindset change. The more gets seen from patients' perspective, the more `health' will be offered with `care'. Innovative solutions are a beginning, but healthcare also requires sustainable patient relationships. If patients feel engaged with healthcare providers, they may trust use of new methods of delivery, new technology and treatments. Healthcare can never work in pieces; we need an integrated holistic approach. There has been so much development on health tech solutions and services, it is time we pool it all together to reap optimal benefits of evidence based clinical innovations and outputs. As stakeholders in Indian healthcare industry, we must advocate, use and offer these to those for whom they were designed. If patient centric health tech is developed, promoted and availed, we will all benefit from it. With technology and our world class experts, we can take care of preventions and interventions. Last but not the least, with technology or without it, everyone on the healthcare spectrum can never stop being empathetic- because the core of healthcare evolution is never going beyond `human lives'.
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