Attend Health 2.0 India at Bangalore on 7 and 8 February 2014

Health 2.0 India is back with it’s Third Annual Edition.


Health 2.0 India ”Simply Lead” 2014 conference is slated for 7th and 8th February at Bangalore.
The Event will showcase demos and presentations in;

1. - Designing an improved patient experience for a Billion people
2. - Trending – Startups, Funding and Accelerating Health 2.0
3. - Health 2.0 in the village
4. - Quantified self, wearable sensors and trackers
5. - Mobile health in real life
6. - Rise of big data and better decisions
7. - Pharma and better outcomes , etc.

Here is your chance to see all this healthcare technology from our very own Indian entrepreneurs and some international examples, in action at Bangalore on 7th and 8th February 2014.

You can get a 30% discount off the registration fees by using the discount coupon code: DIGMED2CON

 You can also mail me drneelesh@digmed.in  for details

See you at Health 2.0 @ Bangalore on 7th and 8th Feb.

Doctor Alert! Stop Giving Away Free Medical Advice on Telephones

Telephonic consultations are a fact of life for all doctors. We offer you tool to increase your branding and also charge for telephonic consultations via a simple My Teleconsult Card.

It has never been so simple before! We offer you a Personalized (with your profile snap) prepaid telephonic consultation card for your patients. We charge about 40/- to 80/- (depending on plan) for each 10 minute teleconsultation card (activation charges included). You can make 200% to 800% profit by fixing your own rate for each Ten minute telephonic consultation.

As a bonus, the same phone number can be used by your patients to book an appointment, at No Cost!!

You can easily check a demo by simply dialing  1206655300
You can start with our trial pack @ Rs. 999/- (plus Taxes) for Twelve Ten minute Prepaid teleconsult cards.
If you are interested in this service, kindly fill this online form or contact me at drneelesh@digmed.in

E.H.R Standards for India : GOI Report

Electronic health records are a summary of the various electronic medical records that get generated during any clinical encounter. Without standards, a lifelong summary is not possible as different records from different sources spread across ~80+ years will potentially need to be brought into one summary. To achieve this, a set of pre-defined standards for information exchange that includes images, clinical codes and a minimum data set is imperative.

Foreword to ‘ E.H.R Standards for India ’ by the GOI.

The Government of India, as it goes for the unveiling of National Health Portal, comes out with a definitive guidelines for E.H.R standards in India. The document takes a look at E.H.R standards to be followed throughout different medical provider institutions in India, so that medical data becomes portable and easily transferable. Its amazing to see how many ehealth companies have been stumped because of lack of such a document earlier. This might be good news for a number of companies which foolishly wait for standards to be finalized, instead of simply building the most Flexible, Secure, Doctor & Patient-friendly E.H.R they can.

More importantly , It takes a look at Data ownership.

It says “The health data is owned by the patient while the actual records are owned by the care providers who act as the custodians of the data. Adequate safeguards to ensure data privacy and security must strictly be adhered to at all times. Patients must have the privilege to verify the accuracy of their health data and gain access whenever they wish to do so.

Thankfully, Patients have earned their spot in our policy making. We know that products which do not have the patient interactions in mind will just not succeed. Now that we have a roadmap ahead, It’s a race to the finish for the nascent ehealth industry in our country.

You can download a copy of the document here.

The Inside Story of National Health Portal of India

National Health Portal of India has been on our minds for a long time. This is the inside story of working for the national health portal of India which is scheduled for launch on 1st October 2013, almost four years after it first came under consideration. It’s a very optimistic project and a wordle created from the project report showcases that very well.

First, some history and background.

Backed by the National Knowledge Commission, a working group committee sent its Project Report on setting and developing the national health portal for India in August 2010. The NKC proposed to launch the National Health Information Portal which would serve as a comprehensive source on health information in India. The portal plans to serve as a single point of access for consolidated health information, application and resources on the sector and aim to cater to a wide spectrum of users from citizens, to students, healthcare professionals and researchers.

The proposal also aims to create space for other portals, publishers, IT and non IT based interventions. It is envisaged that private enterprises would join the government in creating new tools and services with the help of all the Data to be collected via NHP. This is a humungous task by any standards and the progress on the portal has been understandably slow.

A recent meet at AIIMS organized by HIMSS India and attended by Dr. Suptendra Nath Sarbadhikari, Project Director, Centre for Health Informatics of the National Health Portal cleared the mystery surrounding the progress of National Health Portal. During the meet, a lot of time was spent on stressing the need for Uniform Data Standards to be adopted so that all EHRs across the country (private and public hospitals) can be connected to the national health portal. With the addition of Prof. Indrajit Bhattacharya, the team at the National Health Portal is now well positioned to take this project forward.

The meet highlighted 3 main topics of discussion;

1) Data standards and Interoperability

2) Mobile apps for content distribution

3) Social Media Help desk and social networking activities

In order to accumulate data from various state health departments, government hospitals and private hospitals, we need a common system for entering the health data. The GOI has not yet taken the effort to set up a recommended set of data standards which can be followed by all hospitals and institutes while storing data. Unless data standards to be followed are finalized soon, linking/ merging of diverse sets of healthcare data will be close to impossible in the future.

Mobile apps and device agnostic websites were identified as an important next step in the project. The project objective is also to improve health literacy of the masses in India. One immediate hurdle for the National Health Portal is the need for authentic and high quality content in multiple languages.  At this stage, It is not desirable that NHP spends its efforts and money creating original content for education of consumers and healthcare practitioners.Except for a core team (4 or 5) of graphic artists and subject matter experts to create interactive and visual media on a daily/weekly basis, the task of content creation could very well be outsourced. The NHP team can always validate the content after creation and before it is uploaded to the website. Besides, a lot of content is freely available from international sources like Centre For Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization which can be hot-linked on the portal. Professional content curation and dissemination via mobile apps will play a huge role in providing content for the National Health Portal.

Another important consideration at the NHP meet was the creation of a Social Media Helpdesk for the portal. Social Networking is the new fact of our connected lives today and the NHP plans to make full use of existing platforms like Facebook and Twitter to further its agenda. Social Networking would also be utilized via various health Forums planned on the portal. Social Media will be a key component of the content distribution strategy.

The National Health Portal will always be a work in motion. You, too, can have a say in how that happens. We have created a Facebook page for this project. You can join us on Facebook to share your views/suggestions as well as Tweet us your suggestions by using the hashtag #nhportal.  We will make sure all tweets and comments are forwarded to the right authorities.

This update has also been shared on India Health Network website.

Wearable Technology in Healthcare: Will It Take Root in India?

After self-quantifying apps, with the advent of Google Glasses, Wearable tech is soon going to be a big thing in healthcare.

The movement for self-quantifying patients is not too old. Many experts believe that self-quantifying patients are the logical next step  in evolution of person-centered healthcare. Physicians have found wearable self-quantifying by patients especially useful in management of chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, blood diseases, arthritis etc. With 7 of 10 patients seen in the US by physicians already quantifying themselves using apps and wearable tech, the wearable tech in healthcare market is only destined to grow bigger, at-least in the Indian metros initially. Indian cosmopolitans are just the types to take to this trend sooner (3 to 5 years) rather than later. The unmet demand of self-quantification market in India is presently catered to by a few start-ups like Diabeto (a mobile device),  and we are ready to see more such initiatives soon.

Take a look at some of the affordable wearable tech already present in the markets ranging from bionic lenses to display information, pedometers in shoes, watches as oxymeters, trauma resistant inner-wear and bras with sensors to monitor your heart.

Source: mashable.com via Paul on Pinterest