No country can progress if its citizens are not healthy and do not have access to good healthcare infrastructure. This is one area where, despite investments over the years, India has been sorely lagging.
While urban healthcare facilities have improved quite sharply in the past decade - especially because of private investments and the growth of large chains of multi-speciality and super-speciality hospitals - public delivery of healthcare has not been able to keep pace with the requirements.
In rural areas, healthcare delivery has been getting worse because of both shortage of doctors and other healthcare providers, as well as lack of proper infrastructure.
Is there a way to solve the problems and improve our healthcare facilities in both urban and rural areas, and provide world-class healthcare experience to our citizens? This section explores a number of ideas about the future of healthcare and medicine in India.
Dr. Devi Shetty of Narayana Hridulaya writes about why we need to adopt large scale robotic surgery to improve the outcomes of our surgeries in the future, while bringing down costs. Dr. K.V. Subramaniam of Reliance Health Sciences looks at how regenerative medicine can transform the treatment of serious diseases in the future, while Dr. V.L. Ramprasad of MedGenome puts forward the case for individualised and proactive treatment using the genomic medicine approach.
Muralidharan Nair of EY proposes a model for better rural healthcare delivery and Milan Rao of GE talks of digital innovations that are transforming healthcare.