Leverage technology for early childhood development: NITI Aayog's Dr VK Paul

New Delhi [India], July 27 : NITI Aayog's Member Dr Vinod Kumar Paul on Wednesday urged the people of the country to connect with technology faster.
"Central Government has developed many platforms for the ease of public and therefore, it is high time for people to get connected with technology faster and start using these platforms," Dr VK Paul said while addressing the people at the inaugural address of the first edition of Digital Health Summit 2022.
The summit was organised with the theme of 'leveraging technology to build patient-centric, inclusive, integrated health' in the national capital today.
Highlighting the need for leveraging technology for early childhood development (children between age group 0 to 6 years), he said that the next frontier for technology intervention is the area of Home Care for patients.
Technology outreach coupled with Physical Outreach is the way forward for hospitals, he added.
Emphasising the need for a digital push, he underlined the need for digitization and shared his concern regarding the lagging behind of Public Sector Hospitals and Government Medical Colleges in digitization.
The CEO of National Health Advisory, Dr R S Sharma also emphasised the importance of technology and said that it can add immense value to the healthcare sector.
"One of the visions of Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission was improving the healthcare services through digitization," he said while addressing the audience on the importance of digitization and mentioned that so far 71 billion Aadhar Card authentication has been done as of today (Wednesday).
"The next achievement of the government was developing a payment platform, called UPI. In June 2022 itself, 600 billion transactions have taken place on the UPI platform. During COVID, more digitization of healthcare took place due to the restrictions on visiting hospitals. But technology was used in a fragmented manner," he said.
He opined that digital elements need to be connected for applications to run smoothly and further mentioned that the Central government was developing a Health Exchange Platform for Hospital authorities and insurance companies to interact directly for disbursing insurance claims of a patient faster.
"NHA is working on developing a Unified Health Interface (UHI) which will be an open network designed to enable interoperable digital health service delivery. Unlike big hospitals, smaller hospitals, and clinics are not able to afford digital systems as they are expensive. To enable them to use technology, the Central government has developed Health Management Information System (HMIS) where the government is in talks with the Technology providers to enable the smaller players to store their data in the cloud at a reasonable price," he added.
Urging all healthcare service providers to come together for self-regulation, Shashank ND, Chairman, CII Subcommittee on Digital Health and CEO and Co-Founder of Practo, said that today more than 600 people have the access to the Internet. The rising usage of technology has given Indians better access to the health care cohort, he added.
However, the chairman of CII National Healthcare Council and CMD of Medanta Naresh Trehan, while delivering his remarks at the Inaugural session, said that the digital revolution has evolved over the years and we can now can monitor the various organs of the body easily with the help of technology.
He also emphasized the importance of value addition to patients and added that technology like video consultation can help in cutting down multiple travels of a patient to a different destination for receiving treatment.