In an interaction with ETHealthwold, Ramya Subramanian, Co-founder and COO at Docty, elucidates on mental health consultations are seeing an uptake in telehealth services.
Q: How beneficial do you believe are the telehealth services in providing mental health support especially amid the COVID pandemic?
As per a report by the Telemedicine Society of India (TSI) in December 2020, the use of telehealth for mental health consultations and queries grew by over 300 per cent during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Seemingly, the first wave was critical in terms of major lifestyle adjustments, leading to a causal association between pandemic restrictions and telehealth consultations, as people dreaded visiting clinics and hospitals. Although, the latter part of the pandemic actually proved that people preferred telehealth much more than physical consultations. Individuals—with better awareness of their mental health—could reach out to the best psychologists and psychiatrists without having to travel distances.
In the past eight months, Docty has seen a 24 per cent MoM increment in the number of mental health consultations. The app even saw 60 per cent more demand by corporates, for individual and group sessions on mental wellness than that seen before the pandemic.
Q: What are the challenges you see in telehealth adoption in India?
Docty is operational in three countries across three different continents. While each country brings forth its own set of challenges, India is a forerunner in terms of adopting new technology and making the most out of it. However, the most prominent challenge in India is its broken health system and the non-tech savvy rural population. Telehealth startups and the government are certainly doing their bits towards the system’s integration but it’s a gradual process and only well-executed solutions will prove beneficial. For example, the Indian government’s “Digital Health ID (DHID)” initiative is a crucial step towards digitizing the citizens’ medical records. If implemented rightly, it can build the necessary backend infrastructure needed for the advancement of telehealth, especially for rural communities.
Q: How can AI revolutionalise the telehealth service being offered in India today?
In a country like India, where the doctor-patient ratio is 1:2000, it becomes a tedious task to look after all the problems of the patients, more so during a global pandemic. By bringing human intelligence together with Artificial Intelligence (AI), we could create a healthcare system that releases the burden of administrative tasks of doctors and promotes precise diagnosis. Complimenting the efforts of doctors, AI-enabled care would help to define and decide the treatment regimes for patients suffering from complex diseases.
Presently, we are seeing AI being employed for consultations, drug deliveries, insurance, patient support, and even the government is leveraging AI support in its mission to digitize the healthcare infrastructure of the country. The databases generated out of the entire AI-integrated system have the potential to shape the foundation of predictive healthcare and pull the entire healthcare ecosystem under a single umbrella to eliminate fragmentation and urban-rural disparity from the country’s medical structure. However, all of this needs to be done without compromising patients’ data and privacy.
Q: What prompted Docty to develop an AI-enabled Emotion Index?
Docty was started with an aim to eliminate 3 major healthcare challenges faced worldwide – fragmented care, limited resources, and long waiting time. Docty’s AI-enabled Emotion Index feature was developed to help doctors come up with quicker and more accurate clinical diagnoses. The feature interprets patients’ emotions through facial recognition in order to assist doctors in their diagnoses and endeavour to drive behaviours for improved outcomes.
Q: Tell us about Docty’s growth plans for the coming years?
Currently, Docty is at the early stage of funding and is actively in discussions with VCs for its expansion plans. In a short period, we have managed to partner and collaborate with different players from various industries. At one end, we have formed alliances with pharmacy chains, diagnostic service providers, and clinics to offer better healthcare services to the users, and on the other, we have partnered with payment apps, community residents, corporates, and even official state bodies to help make quality care available and accessible to a wider set of people, regardless of their geography — through online consultation.
Source: health.economictimes.indiatimes.com
