India has a population of about 1.2 billion people with more that 60% living in the rural areas.

With
such a vast population, the industry is expected to touch USD 275 billion 2028. Indian healthcare
industry offers a variety of solutions and boosts some of the best medical practitioners and hospitals.
Medical tourism has also seen a major growth with many foreign nationals coming here to receive
affordable yet quality procedures.

Even though the industry has such a vast potential, the healthcare system is still unorganized to a large
extent. Besides the government run hospitals and recognized private hospitals, there are numerous
small clinics and hospitals which operate within the cities and rural areas. Many of them are not even
registered with the concerned authorities. Furthermore, there is a lack of general awareness among
the population about the various healthcare practices and patient rights. The lack of proper
connectivity in many regions further add to this problem. Compared with the developed and
developing countries, India still has a long way to go. Refer the below table for a small comparison of
healthcare infrastructure between India and rest of the world.

Source: KPMG Report-“Healthcare: Reaching out to the masses

For the purpose of this case study, we have identified below problems that needs to addressed:

- Lack of healthcare information to the masses:

Majority of the population are unaware of the various medical conditions. The century old
mindset prevalent in many areas has led to unwanted deaths due to misinformation and the
patient getting the required treatment on time.
- Malpractices at the grassroot level:
There are many physicians practicing in India who are not properly trained. This leads to
misdiagnosis and creating more hassle for the patients.
- Central information system to track the epidemic diseases:
There is no centralized system to track the diseases in localities. If there was a centralized
system, epidemic can be controlled or prevented at the initial stage by analysing the pattern
of the patients getting admitted.
- Bureaucracy in hospital admission procedure:
A lot of unnecessary paperwork is required at the time of admission, treatment, insurance and
patient discharge. Having a digital solution, can reduce a lot of this paperwork.
- Lack of co-ordination between hospitals:
Hospitals are generally hesitant to co-ordinate with each other due to fear of losing their
business. In most of the cases, the diagnosis and information is not transferred between the
hospitals. More often that not, the hospitals do not fully utilize the power the digital medium.
 Reports that could easily be transferred on mail has to be carried by the patient in a hard copy
format.
- Treatment for emergency cases:
In case, of an accident or emergency, unnecessary time is wasted in identifying the whether
the patient has had some past medical conditions. This necessitates a check which consumes
time that could make a difference between life or death.

To tackle all these problems, internet is the way ahead. India is aggressively increasing the digital
footprint. With competition heating up in the IT and telecom sector, India’s digital penetration has
seen a huge growth. The population of India using the internet is expected to reach 500 million by
mid-2018.

POPULATION USING INTERNET (in millions)

600

500
500
471
Population in million

400
420
375
300
278
200

100

0
2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 (est)
Year

Source: Kantar-IMRB I-Cube 2017, All India Users Estimates, October 2017

URBAN VS RURAL-INTERNET USERS (IN MILLIONS)

Rural Urban

289 304
246 263

177
182 195
157
129
101
Urban
Rural

2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 (est)

Source: Kantar-IMRB I-Cube 2017, All India Users Estimates, October 2017
Our solution for this is a centralized “Healthcare Information system” which will be supported and
analysed by AI. The idea is to keep a record of the all the data in a centralized cloud based system.
The solution and roadmap is explained in the sections below.