The Covid-19 pandemic drove home the point that partnerships and collaborations are pivotal to achieving our healthcare goals through a solution-based approach. While we don’t need a health crisis to realize the benefits of collective effort, there is now a growing awareness that collaboration among healthcare players is a win-win situation for all stakeholders, including patients.
Healthcare players are working within an ecosystem which is striving to address the barriers around access, awareness, and inter-connectivity among networks to bring good health to the public. Partnerships are the only sustainable way to amplify results faster. Today we are seeing a rising trend in partnerships between hospitals and healthcare technology companies, to address the needs of patients. According to a McKinsey report on hospitals in Europe and the US, there is growing awareness of the contribution healthcare technology companies can make, toward curtailing hospital costs and improving the quality of care.
The winning combination of technology companies and hospital care providers can potentially expedite expansion of healthcare capacity and adoption of new technologies. For example, deploying flexible and capital-efficient commercial models can help hospitals reduce fixed costs and improve service levels, in addition to giving medical technology companies the opportunity to service extended patient communities. For both stakeholders, operational and clinical care optimization are strategic priorities in the pursuit of reducing the cost of patient procedures, while improving patient outcomes.
In India too, many hospitals are tying up with healthcare technology companies to enhance patient care by adopting various new innovations such as AI tools for predicting a patient’s disease risk, high precision robotic assisted surgery, anatomical models created in a 3D-printing lab for pre-surgical planning, customised implants, etc. These tie-ups are also helping raise awareness around some critical non-communicable diseases such as stroke, various types of cancers, Parkinson’s disorder, among others.
Technology for skilling and improved surgical outcomes
Technology can help in standardizing procedures for better healthcare outcomes. For example, robotic assisted surgery delivers the benefits of minimally invasive surgery, with clear advantages for surgeons. Minimally invasive surgery can now be made available in more places around the world — fewer complications, shorter hospital stays, and faster return to normal activities.
