Healthcare may seem within reach – but it isn’t necessarily so, especially in the rural pockets of the country. The scenario may be slightly better in urban centres – but there exist several challenges that need to be addressed, particularly due to the burden of an ever-rising population.
But as they say, there is opportunity in adversity – that’s exactly what happened when Covid-19 hit the world and taught us to ‘survive and thrive’. The loss of lives and financial distress that came along was a rude shock, but it also unearthed a golden opportunity for the healthcare industry to step up its game and ride the digitalization wave.
This is what transpired in the case of JioHealth – a digital gateway, under the aegis of Reliance Jio that prides on empowering the entire health and life science ecosystem, providing personalised healthcare for all. Today, they have over 10 million users, and the numbers are only growing.
In a freewheeling chat with Jibu Elias – Content and Research Head – IndiaAI, Raghuram Lanka – Vice President – JioHealth, Jio Platforms opens up about the journey of the country’s leading digital healthcare platform, the technology that steers JioHealth, the challenges, and more.
The journey of JioHealth
As a country that is facing the pressure of a burgeoning population, accessibility to quality healthcare has always been a huge challenge. In the absence of specialists, the diagnosis and treatment of diseases are often delayed, particularly in rural areas. With JioHealth, there lies a promise to change it all through their key pillars – Awareness, Availability, Accessibility, Accuracy, and Scale.
“It’s heartening to even speak about digital healthcare today. When I launched my startup in 2014, there was only a handful of us who were speaking about digital healthcare. Today, with an increasing number of healthcare solutions being introduced, it is a fabulous time to be a part of this revolution. India is young and is highly adaptive to change,” he added.
Initially, JioHealth was born as a space to make healthcare accessible. The idea was to connect physical healthcare provided by clinics, hospitals, diagnostic labs, and other channels, with the users. But things took a drastic turn during Covid-19 – there was a quick transition from physical to phygital, to now digital.
Although it fast-forwarded growth, there’s another part of the workflow that needs to be addressed, believes Raghuram.
“How do we connect centred workflows that are fragmented on their own? We have attempted to build a patient-centric ecosystem to empower people to manage their health, and also their family members. For us, it is about being that personalised and intelligent health companion that nudges people towards better health outcomes,” he explained, adding that users today can check their health status, have doctor consultations, understand their lab reports, and track medicines, on the JioHealth platform.
Covid-19 as a catalyst
The pandemic has proved to be an opportune moment to make healthcare accessible and affordable by leveraging the power of technology. Today, with an increased base of smartphone users, there is massive potential to reach as many people as possible – across the length and breadth of the country.
At the same time, there is also an untapped pool of non-digital users – both young and old – who are concerned about their health. During Covid-19, when people across age groups and geographies were focused on preventive care, JioHealth was able to amass valuable insights and improve its platform.
“This time helped us accelerate innovation. When have we seen a time when Twitter turned out to be the biggest mode of communication (during the second wave)? WhatsApp was also a channel to know who is healthy or not, and we relied on other social media platforms. During this time, we also got acquainted with words like SpO2 and many more terms. All in all, our knowledge of health and health parameters and the awareness to track health has become stronger than ever post-Covid,” said Raghuram.
Technology as an enabler
Of course, there are several factors behind the success of any platform – but the role of technology is indispensable. When it comes to medical reasoning, there is a huge variation in data, which makes it a challenge to make informed decisions. In the case of temporary or incomplete information, it isn’t easy to carry out an analysis and provide clear reasoning. That’s where new-age technologies like Artificial Intelligence step in, to build a truly intelligent system.
“During the second wave, when labs were carrying out tests in large numbers, reports were being generated in a range of formats. Through AI, it was possible to read some of the unstructured data formats and convert them into text. But the text is not sufficient for a doctor, that’s why we added the AI and ML workflow to convert data into an actionable health state,” he explained.
This means that the data is interpreted and analysed on behalf of the doctor, and then converted into a temporal reading, ensuring personalisation at every step in case of both the patient and doctor.
Spotlight on safety and privacy of data
Innovation and convenience may be critical, but users are also cognisant of how their data is being used. Since healthcare data is particularly sensitive, JioHealth has made consent one of its crucial pillars, to ensure transparency and safety for its users.
In the words of Raghuram, a user can track the people who have access to their data as well as the duration. If there’s any issue, access can be revoked at any point.
“It is both an opt-in and opt-out mechanism. The National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) has been a guiding principle for several digital healthcare apps that are coming up. We are closely working with NDHM to ensure that the consent is duration/time-based vs single access token-based,” he shared, adding that there is also massive duplication of data that typically happens that they are trying to eliminate.
One of their biggest assets is the JioHealth Locker – that stores immutable (which cannot be edited or modified), blockchain-enabled health data of a user, in a secure, privacy-protected, and regulatory-compliant manner.
A promising future
There’s a lot that’s going on behind the scenes at JioHealth, but they are still consistently trying to ensure better health outcomes for everyone.
To realise this dream, Raghuram believes that it is critical to create an ecosystem that connects all the seemingly disparate sources – and integrates them into a single source, nudging people toward a preventive and outcome-driven system.
” We want people to proactively identify some of the conditions early on, rather than toward the later stages,” he concluded.
Source: indiaai.gov.in
