WE BUILT CAPACITY BY COUPLING DIGITAL WITH PHYSICAL

According to Arvind Sivaramakrishnan, Chief Information Officer, Karkinos Healthcare: Medicine is art. Digital is science. When we couple all of this, we find that these are complementary skills. One is feeding the other. This is not either or. Edited excerpts from a video interview...

- Sunil Rajguru

Did the healthcare industry upgrade itself during the pandemic? 

Yes. But more than that I would say is that the realization of digital transformation took place. A lot of these solutions, particularly the biggest one that everybody spoke of, teleconsulting, existed for the last many years. There was always a high degree of scepticism on it. There was a feeling of how can healthcare be delivered without the touch and feel and physical presence? That's one aspect from the consumer side.

From the provider side, the maturity of providing it as real as the physical was lacking. There was a lack of sophistication on both sides. The pandemic forced a situation where we didn't have an option. There was that immediate race of getting it all perfected. Perfected also from a legal standpoint, thanks to the government.

Looking at the healthcare institutions and delivery sector, one realized that by coupling digital with physical, there was that ability for building capacity that did not exist in the physical world. The next aspect was the need to perfect operations so that physical and digital are one and the same. One is not less than the other. Take either one depending on the best fit for the presentation of the clinical condition.

Then comes in the sophistication of the bandwidth and the tools that are used. For example, when we are talking, we cannot have something blurred, break in voice or signal distortions. Because this is not a social encounter but a clinical encounter where a certain amount of looking and perceiving is equally important. Comes with it the tools and techniques that are used to record these encounters and thereby a better understanding and realization of electronic medical records.