siliconindia | | October 20209India in March, 2000, it took a pan-demic 20 years later for the healthcare providers to ramp up its usage. Every effort should be made to continue this momentum as telemedicine brings a host of benefits, mainly cost-saving on transportation and no need to bring patients to the hospital, thereby reduc-ing their chance of getting exposed to the virus. The National Digital Health Mission, launched by the Prime Min-ister on Independence Day, will go a long way to drive this change. The well-coordinated mechanism of be-ing able to access all the information at one place and available to all pos-sible stakeholders ups the healthcare game manifold and is likely to boost the culture of teleconsultation, a crit-ical healthcare lesson learnt during the pandemic. It will also save time otherwise spent in the waiting room and registration and billing counters, ensure transparency on financial ac-tivity and delivery of medicines from as per the prescription -- the other benefits of widespread adoption of telemedicine. However, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), as of March 2019, India has 385 million active internet users above the age of 12, but internet penetration was a modest 36% and only 28% of females in rural India have internet access. Addressing this enormous geographical disparity will be crucial in the coming days.Use of AI to reduce human in-teraction: In the past decade, the world has made considerable prog-ress in adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver healthcare services, and India is not much behind. In the event of this pandemic, AI has been crucial to reduce human interaction and chances of an infection. Glob-ally, AI has been exceptionally ac-curate in predicting susceptibility to lung infections, especially in newly infected COVID-19 patients, and AI-based models have helped iden-tify patients who are more likely to develop severe respiratory issues due to the coronavirus. AI is likely to play an important role in the race towards finding a vaccine ­ it helps in identi-fying which viral epitopes can be tar-geted for vaccine development.Primary care to attract more at-tention: That there is no alternative to preventive and promotive care is one of the biggest lessons of the pan-demic. This, we may hope, should bring back the focus on improving the primary care infrastructure, espe-cially in tertiary and satellite towns and rural areas. A robust primary healthcare system will ensure that in the event of another outbreak like coronavirus, such centres could first diagnose any patient showing signs of any viral fever and thus speed up `test, trace, treat' effectively. A well-oiled primary healthcare system will also play an important role in creat-ing awareness and immunising peo-ple in a community.Adherence to safety and hy-giene guidelines: This is one aspect of healthcare delivery that was ne-glected for a long, long time. How-ever, the pandemic has ensured these norms are followed just right. The practice has percolated in non-med-ical settings and in families as well where increased focus on hand hy-giene may have a positive impact on other infectious diseases as well. AI has been crucial to reduce human interaction and chances of an infection
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