NITI Aayog member (Health) Dr V K Paul on Wednesday highlighted the need for leveraging technology for early childhood development and expressed his concern over public sector hospitals and government medical colleges lagging in the digitisation of healthcare services.

Addressing the first edition of Digital Health Summit 2022 on ‘Leveraging Technology to build Patient-Centric, Inclusive, Integrated Health’ Dr Paul said the next frontier for technology intervention is the area of home care for patients.?

At the event organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry, he said technology outreach coupled with physical outreach is the way forward for hospitals and? shared his concern that public sector hospitals and government medical colleges are lagging in digitization.

Dr R S Sharma, the CEO of the National Health Authority (NHA) highlighted the importance of technology in addressing India's problems and stressed that technology can add immense value to the healthcare sector.

One of the visions of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission was improving healthcare services through digitization, he said.

While elaborating on the importance of digitization, he referred to the Aadhaar project and highlighted that 71 billion authentications have been done so far.?

The government's next achievement was developing a payment platform called UPI. In June 2022 600 billion transactions took place on UPI platforms, he highlighted.

But technology was used in a fragmented manner. It was in silos which were not scalable. Digital elements need to be connected for applications to run smoothly, Dr Sharma said.

The NHA CEO said the Central government was developing a health exchange platform for hospitals and insurance companies to interact directly for disbursing insurance claims of a patient faster.

The NHA is working on developing a Unified Health Interface which will be an open network designed to enable interoperable digital health service delivery, he said.?

For hospitals and clinics which are not able to afford digital systems since they are expensive, the Union government developed the Health Management Information System and is in talks with technology providers to allow the smaller players to store data on cloud storage at a reasonable price.

-With PTI Input