The hospitals are not the safest places today for the patients, said Devi Shetty, founder and chairman of Narayana Health, and a noted voice in the healthcare sector.
Vital care in hospitals suffers because of communication failures, with 80% of the hospitals across the world not having electronic medical records (EMR). “India is in a bright position to develop the EMR technology, and make it available to 80% of the global hospitals,” Shetty said at the IFQM Symposium.
Dilip Shanghvi, managing director of Sun Pharmaceuticals said that the Indian pharmaceutical industry has become competitive in making pharma products at a high speed and large scale. “The remarkable achievement in terms of developing and reverse engineering a large number of new products year after year and at a speed makes one respect the ingenuity of it,” Shanghvi said.
India has become the most important country on the planet in terms of supporting the maintenance of health, said Peter Bains, group CEO of Biocon.
In terms of statistics, Bains said that 20% of the volume of drugs consumed globally every day are intellectual property (IP) protected while 80% is non-IP protected. “The generic industry maintains the health of the planet while the innovation industry improves the standard of care. India contributes for 40% of volume (of drugs) consumed in the US, and 25% in the UK. India already has a fundamental central role in the maintenance of health across the globe. India now needs to move up on the innovation curve,” Bains said.
Shetty said that India can leapfrog to take a much larger role of the global stage. “Prime Minister has recently announced that India will add 75,000 medical seats over the next five years. Most countries don’t even have a few thousand medical seats. It is important that India becomes not only the medicine supplier to the world, Indian doctor should become the healers of the world,” he said.
