According to members of the health care industry, they are going through a rather trying phase with compliance issues, protection concerns from breach of practice and increasing costs. Also there is constant need for IT and digital updation in their execution coupled with demand for end users to have information at their fingertips.

The programme titled “Disruptive Risks in Healthcare”, recently held at the Bengal Chamber premises focused on providing tips and guidance to combat the challenges faced by healthcare sectors so that relevant and fast solutions emerge.

Cheryl Taylor, Centre of Excellence - Health Care Practice Protiviti Inc., who has about two decades of expertise and professional experience in leading healthcare operations, revenue cycle activities and organized optimization across business models, was the chief speaker.

Also present was Jennifer Stout, Manager-Centre of Excellence –Healthcare Practice Protiviti Inc.

Both addressed the issues of prevalent health care focus among patients and healthcare providers.

According to the speakers, digital transformation is something that cannot happen in one go. It’s a gradual process. To transform from a manual data into a digitized format is a step by step process that needs a structured roadmap. It involves organizational education, implementation, monitoring and then subsequent digitization occurs, they stated.

They also said that there is wide spread belief among industry leaders that digital technology is the fourth industrial revolution and the engine and enabler behind innovation and disruption that will radicalize the levels of efficiency and customer experience. Like internet, digitalization will cause sweeping transformation, across multiple aspects of business inspiring opportunities for value creation, while also creating a major source of risk at the same time. The introduction of digital services will be one of the most important factors transforming healthcare sector in India and across the world over the next decade.

Healthcare is among the few industries that can profoundly impact larger populations with technology innovation, according to the speakers. The challenges of new regulations, varied demographic spread/ providing care to aging population, access to patient data, prevalence of chronic diseases, straining public finances et al can find some path breaking solutions with digital playing a vital role and providing superior patient care.

As stakes increase, status quo is not an option, they said.

According to the speakers, the healthcare system will look very different in India in the next decade. It will be “consumer centric”, allowing them to take more responsibility in managing their health. The two big shifts that this change in focus is going to bring about are: Disruptions to the location of the care (from “out of hospital” to “in-home care”) and Disruptions to the type of care (from “diagnose and treat” to “prevent and manage”).

The first one can exponentially improve the healthcare outreach in the country and in particular to the rural areas.

The second has the potential to reduce the burden on public healthcare service providers, since the focus will shift towards quality services at affordable costs.

With the advent of patient-centric healthcare greater emphasis will be on prevention and access to using digital technologies to improve efficiency, boosting productivity and driving down costs.

Subrata Bagchi, Senior Managing Director, Protiviti India Member Firm said, “At Protiviti, we have worked extensively with organizations across the healthcare value chain and invested in developing our Global Healthcare Centre of Excellence (CoE). We plan to leverage these insights and experiences from the CoE and serve healthcare providers in India by formulating a customer-centric digital blue print, performing holistic analysis to determine capabilities to make them digitally intelligent, enabling them to create a data governance structure, managing transformation risks, assessing the risks in their digital journey, perform in conjunction with the medical profession advance analytics to make more informed decisions and becoming a destination partner by helping them create a digital ecosystem.”