Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Udaipur organized a pioneering webinar to discuss and gain insights into possible digital solutions for effective healthcare management in India on March 16, 2022. It was a collaborative effort of the Institute’s Center of Healthcare and the Centre of Excellence in Digital Enterprise Management.

The webinar centered on the theme of ‘Rethinking Healthcare Management with Digital Solutions’ and saw the presence of more than 800 participants who were healthcare professionals, medical practitioners, medical researchers, and digital heads, along with faculty, staff, and students of IIM Udaipur.

Addressing the audience, Prof Janat Shah, Director, IIM Udaipur, said, “The webinar on the digital health space is another important area being looked at by us in the second webinar which is being held as a part of the decade anniversary celebration of IIM Udaipur, having been founded in 2011. As an institute, we were among the foremost to recognize the growing importance of digital technologies and how they are shaping not only businesses and economies but even areas like healthcare management which have immense complications. We have been focused on building a research-centric Institute while doing excellent transformational on the academic front.”

In his keynote address, Mr. Kiran Anandampillai, CEO & Founder – iDrishti and Adviser (Technology) at National Health Authority, India, said, “With healthcare going digital in many ways, there are still many challenges which need to be resolved. To save the longitudinal reports/information of a patient’s health and standardize the machine-readable report, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and National Health Authority have started sharing the health records through Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission by digitally linking PHR addresses of individuals and lodging the reports in standardized FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) format. This initiative comes with a Health Information Exchange and Consent Management (HIE-CM) system giving individuals control and consent of their information to be shared with the providers. The digital health stack initiative of NDHM provides the framework for the next generation of the healthcare system in India. This will help India leapfrog into the next-gen digitized healthcare eco-system like what Aadhar and UPI did in domains such as citizen identity and financial system. The national health stack also opens lots of entrepreneurial/consulting opportunities to those interested to work in the cutting edge of digital space and contribute to the healthcare domain.”

The webinar included a panel discussion on “How Digital Solutions Could Help Shape the Future of Healthcare in India” featuring Prof. Vijay Chandru (Commissioner, Lancet Citizen’s Commission on reimagining India’s Health System), Mr. Jagdeep Gambhir (CEO & Co-Founder, Karma Healthcare) and Mr. Jaydev Varma (Head of Product, Ancora Health, Amsterdam) and moderated by Prof. Prakash Satyavageeswaran and Prof. Vedha Ponappan of IIM Udaipur.

Prof. Vijay Chandru shared his journey of becoming an entrepreneur from an academician of providing tools for better analysis of human gene and the use of digital technologies in solving complex healthcare problems, a computer scientist by profession. Mr. Jagdeep Gambhir from Karma Healthcare deep-dives into the Nurse Assistant Model, where a physical clinic, pharmacy, and laboratories are built, and consultations are provided on video calls to a qualified medical practitioner. Mr. Jaydev Verma, shared his Ancora Healthcare journey by focusing on the three problems grabbing the society at large. The population health problem, value of digital therapeutics, and lifestyle linked disorders associated with health, and inability to identify these create havoc.