When did you visit a hospital last and found a process, which made you sit up and take serious notice?
Hospitals in India are crying for serious innovations, yet we see so little of them. While, one keeps hearing about mind-boggling advances in medicine and technology, yet very little of that is reaching our hospitals. The largest and the most modern hospitals in India at best pay lip service to serious innovation. They do not even have innovation teams, which can identify and adopt innovative practices, which help cure faster, keep people healthy and provide a better customer experience at the hospital.
The reason for this are not far to seek.
Healthcare services in India are still in their infancy. While, large hospital chains like Fortis, Apollo and Max Healthcare have the latest equipment and the most sought after doctors, they are still not customer focussed. Innovations happen, when the customer is the focus of the organisation. Our healthcare services organisations are still mired in pandering to the egos of their senior doctors, guarding them like mother hen, lest they fly the coop. Since, there are only so many ‘star doctors’ and they are mostly responsible for pulling in the patients, one can not really fault the hospitals for focusing on their crown jewels rather than on patients. To make matters worse, most of these star doctors are older, quite often set in their ways, it is virtually impossible to make them innovate. They are wildly successful individuals, who have been at the top of their game for many years and see no reason to do things differently. Thus, in a Max Hospital in Delhi, you will have the younger doctors, using the Hospital Information System, the older and more senior ones, would still prefer a pen and paper, mindless of the fact that this means that every-time the patient comes to visit them, he would be carrying the past prescriptions and records in a file. And, this when Max has spent a fortune in putting in place a state of the art HIS!!!
The other driver of innovation is competition, which in the Indian context is sadly lacking. While, there are millions of mom and pop nursing homes and down the street clinics, good hospitals are few. With India growing close to 9%, many Indians can now afford good quality healthcare services. With health insurance also contributing its might, we have a situation, where there are too many patients chasing too few hospital beds. As the economy grows further and we see the benefits of our growth percolate down deeper, people would continue to move up from small and dodgy nursing homes to swanky, well organised hospitals. Thus, at the top end of the Indian healthcare market, serious competition is a long way off. This does not augur too well for healthcare innovations.
Health Insurance companies can drive serious healthcare innovations. They are always on the lookout of shaving costs and innovations often do that. However, in India, health insurance is still largely controlled by the state-owned general insurance behemoths, whose health insurance portfolio is a tiny fraction of the general insurance business that they handle. They themselves are riddled with inefficiency and corruption and can hardly be expected to drive healthcare innovations. The standalone health insurance companies in the private sector are still wobbly and are trying to find their feet. They too are quite clearly a long way off from driving innovations at our hospitals.
The only way we can possibly drive innovation in healthcare services in India is by becoming more demanding as patients. Impatient patients can bring about change in the delivery off at least the non medical services at our favourite hospitals. Thus, if a doctor is running late with his OPD appointments, patients can ask the hospitals to send sms’s in advance to patients, who are scheduled later in the day. If the hospital queuing system is inefficient, a patient can always suggest another system, which works better. (Check-out the new system at Max Medcentre in New Delhi, it is simple and efficient).
As far as bigger innovations are concerned, the hospitals and their various stakeholders have to drive those. Change inevitably brings pain in the shorter run, however those organisations, who have their eyes set on the horizon, cannot but embrace change. Even though, in India, the external circumstances may not be very conducive to innovations, we must remember, all great innovations are internally driven, largely rooted in a desire to be more efficient, more customer friendly, more differentiated and more profitable.
Indian hospitals must innovate to compete with themselves and to be better than what they were yesterday. That is the only way to long-term success.
The Healthcare Blog 