As India’s healthcare market is on the brink of transformation, Harish Bijoor 's tips on seizing opportunities and tapping into vast potential.
Published Aug 08, 2024 | 7:00 AM ⚊ Updated Aug 08, 2024 | 7:00 AM
Representative image of medical tourism (iStock)
“The healthcare market in India is what I call a ‘saliva market’ — you know, saliva makes you want more and more,” says brand guru Harish Bijoor. This vivid analogy, shared at the Dakshin Healthcare Summit organised by South First and TV9 Network, highlights the immense potential and growing hunger for personalised and innovative healthcare solutions in the country.
India’s healthcare market, Bijoor said, is valued at a staggering $372 billion. This represents a vast, largely untapped opportunity. Despite its size and potential, many areas within the sector remain underdeveloped, leaving significant room for growth.
“It’s a very huge market — a $372 billion market as far as India is concerned. It’s a large employment market with 7.5 million people employed in the healthcare industry in India,” he noted, underscoring that healthcare is a major employer, besides being vital to the nation’s economy.
“We scrape the extreme top tip of the iceberg of healthcare opportunity in India,” he said, urging his audience to dive deeper and explore the vast opportunities that lie beneath.
Even at an estimated $8 billion, India’s medical tourism market is far from its full potential, Bijoor said, explaining that world-class healthcare facilities and relatively low costs make it possible for India to attract a larger share of international patients seeking affordable and high-quality medical care.
To capitalise on this opportunity, Bijoor explained, there was need to improve infrastructure, streamline processes, and market India as a premier destination for medical tourism.
The e-health sector, he said, was another area ripe for expansion. Currently valued at $10.6 billion with 10 unicorns, e-health has enormous growth potential. The increasing demand for digital healthcare solutions, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, presents an opportunity to revolutionise how healthcare is delivered in India. This too will require significant investment in technology, data management, and cybersecurity, he said.
Before providing for medical tourists, however, the significant challenge the country faces is the enormous disparity in access to quality medical care within the country.
“There are no primary health care facilities for nearly 28 percent of Indians,” he said, adding that 70 percent of healthcare facilities are concentrated in the top 20 cities, with remote and rural locations grossly underserved. “Addressing these gaps is crucial to ensuring that the benefits of a growing healthcare market are felt across the entire country,” he added.
Advocating for greater integration of technology with healthcare, Bijoor said there were three stages of adoption of technology by Indian hospitals – flirting with digital, marrying digital, and embedding digital into the DNA of healthcare operations. He said over 80 percent of Indian hospitals only “flirted” with digital technology.
With artificial intelligence (AI) and other technological advancements contributing to healthcare sector, every technology person working in healthcare will also count as a “healthcare person”, he said, urging his audience to consider innovative solutions and employment potential.
Stressing the need to accommodate the needs and interests of patients, Bijoor said most hospitals function like they are an island into which change is still to seep.
“They are still very rooted in the old way of doing things, whether it is administration or clinical procedures,” he said. “I’ve done research across 13 hospital chains in this country. No hospital chain respects the time of people. I’ve done research with about 64,000 people, and every one of them complained that doctors do not respect the time of patients because they think patients have all the time, because they think patients are at the mercy of the doctors,” he said, adding that the future will be very different.
(Edited by Rosamma Thomas)
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