Mobile health will leverage and change the landscape of healthcare in India
Shireesh Sahai, CEO ,Wolters Kluwer ,brings to Wolters Kluwer more than 20 years as a global leader – working in India, the U.S., Europe, China, and throughout Asia. He joins Wolters Kluwer after a career at General Electric Company where he most recently held the position of Director of GE’s Healthcare Government business.
Wolters Kluwer is a global leader in professional information services. Professionals in the areas of legal, business, tax, accounting, finance, audit, risk, compliance and healthcare rely on Wolters Kluwer’s market leading information-enabled tools and software solutions to manage their business efficiently, deliver results to their clients, and succeed in an ever more dynamic world. Sahai, in conversation with Ekta Sriavstava, Healthtechnology.in
About the event
I think phenomenal. Attendance is really great, we have participants not only clinicians and doctors but representative from the technological company. Even some CSR companies are here. So, diversity in the attendance is something I have never seen in any of the other conclave.
Wolters Kluwer’s involvement in healthcare domain
Wolster Kluvar, is aproximately 5 billion dollar, Dutch multinational and it’s into information services. It has four verticals, where healthcare is one, other are tax and accounting, legal and financial compliance services. In healthcare domain, we provide information to the professionals, so that we can make them perform their job better. Like- we have a tool called up-to date which is evidence based tool and it can reside in the smart phones and it can give answers to any doctor’s question, clinical question when he is treating the patient. And within 90second any clinical query will be answered. Simultaneously, we have tools for nurses, pharmacists, education so kind of we cover the entire ecosystem of healthcare in terms of information services..
M2M as an emerging technology in healthcare
We have a great opportunity in M2M and the reason I say that, is because India is going to be third largest country of user of smart phones, that’s where the mHealth comes in, and mobile health coupled with clinical decision support system like what we provide is really going to change the patient outcome. The product like up-to-date, has been into existence for last 20 years and more then 8, 50,000 doctors are using it today. Sharing with you one of our research, in one of the hospital in Singapore where they are using this tool, the doctors change the decision and diagnosis around 37% of time. Just imagine the power, this tool has. In one of the other study with Harvard we come to know that, by using this tools doctors have saved 11,000 more lives then what they are saving before. So, the beauty of this tool is it can be fit into the smartphones. And India being the third largest as mobile users, I think this is the right time when mobile health will leverage and change the landscape of healthcare in India.
Competition and Retaliation strategy
In terms of competence, I would say that in India we have close about 10,000 customers and according to one of the survey during last year and it came out that 95 percent of them said that this tool has really changed the patient outcome. So, we feel at least in the clinical decision side we stand out from our competition.
Challenges in reaching out the customer
Technology is an innovation to the Indian market, while it has been existing from long time. Any innovation takes innovation diffusion. So, the challenge we are facing is how fast we can take this tool to the customer and I think reaching out to the customers is the biggest challenge.
M2M as an emerging technology
Because of the penetration of the mobile phones in the India, I am very hopeful that mhealth can be a tool for the clinical decision support system to change the healthcare landscape in India.
Reaching the unreachable
Absolutely! That’s my point. 70 percent of Indian population lives in rural areas. Or, imagine if you have a product like this, and you give it to a PHC, they can have access to the best clinical support data, with which they can treat the patient there. I think this will be a landscape of that. You might know that one of the biggest reasons of the people going below the poverty line is the fact that they have to travel from rural areas to urban areas to get the treatment, which creates an additional burden over them like staying, food, travelling and tools like this can cut the cost down and will make healthcare more affordable in their own places.
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