Lybrate, India’s first and largest mobile healthcare communication and delivery platform, has recently announced its digital partnership with the Indian Medical Association (IMA) to educate over 2.5 lakh doctors under its fold on how best to incorporate technology in their practice for communicating with patients and multiply their presence for reaching out to more people.

Under the partnership spanning over a year, Lybrate will provide technical excellence to IMA in innumerable ways. The foremost will be to coach its members, spread across 30 states and 1700 branches, and the entire medical fraternity about using technology for better communication with the patients and increase their presence across geographies, diminishing the boundary barriers.

“IMA is a prestigious body in the medical arena. It has been doing commendable things relating to people’s health involving its wide network of doctors. As Lybrate is also working to solve the fundamental problem of healthcare delivery in India that is inaccessibility of doctors, our goals are aligned with each other and support our objectives,” said Saurabh Arora, chief executive officer, Lybrate.

“As IMA’s digital partner, it will be our endeavour to help bridge the skills gap in the healthcare sector with respect to technology. Doctors will be taught how to make effective use of the digital space to manage their practice better and communicate with more patients without moving from their place of practice. They will also be encouraged to help the masses by providing second opinions and sharing their experience and knowledge aimed at creating awareness about preventive side of medicine,” he added.

Other than educating doctors to effectively manage their practice online, Lybrate will also help make IMA technologically advanced in its functioning, aiding effective policy making and programmes’ implementation. The company will also reach out to medical students under the partnership to impart training relating to digitizing practice, which they could immediately implement post their studies.

“The lack of clear guidelines as well as the absence of technical know-how among the medical fraternity have resulted in a slower growth of m-health and e-health space in India. Given the size and vastness of our country, the scope of digital healthcare is immense and if implemented in the right way, it can help solve many problems faced by the sector. We are extremely happy to come along with Lybrate as our digital partner and hope that together we can work towards making healthcare accessible to the people of India,” said a joint statement by Padma Shri awardee, national president, IMA Dr A Marthanda Pillai and Padma Shri awardee,secretary general, IMA Dr K K Aggarwal.

In India, shortage of doctors is a major issue, apparent from the doctor-patient ratio which is abysmally low at 1:1700. Lybrate saw the solution in technology to fix the issue of doctors’ crunch in the country and solve the problem of inaccessibility of healthcare experts.

By making doctors and users communicate, Lybrate has multiplied the presence of healthcare experts to different geographical locations. People are now not restricted to one-zone geography when it comes to seeking an opinion from a healthcare expert. A person sitting in tier 1 and tier 2 city can very well communicate with doctors using the Lybrate app, which was hitherto not possible.

The partnership with IMA supports its cause of making quality healthcare available to the Indian people. Lybrate will look at associating at other levels with the umbrella body of doctors’ to help more people benefit moving forward.