Innovations in Healthcare: Challenges and Role of Digital Transformation

Moving towards a proactive or preventive care approach requires data-driven, clinically meaningful insights to be available for a physician to make prognostic, predictive decisions early-on

By Reenita Das, Partner & Sr Vice President and Kamaljit Behera and Siddharth Shah, Industry Analysts, Transformational Health, Frost & Sullivan | Jan 05, 2020

Asclepius was the God of Medicine, according to ancient Greek Mythology; and his ‘rod of Asclepius’, the snake entwined staff, is still a widely recognised symbol of medicine. For centuries, Asclepius was (and is) considered as perhaps the greatest healer. But surprisingly, ‘medicine’ is defined a little differently: according to the Oxford dictionary, it is ‘the science and practice of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease (often excluding surgery)’. Yet, in healthcare today, we focus on providing reactive care – treating sick patients, instead of proactive care – helping prevention of diseases as well, in line with the complete definition of medicine. We are now therefore facing challenges with chronic conditions, for example, and don’t really have a Panacea (incidentally a daughter of Asclepius), at least a quick one for these problems.