The Union health ministry's revised Electronic Health Record (EHR) standards-2016 portend well for growth of technology driven healthcare platforms in the country, said Neeraj Joshi, co-founder and CEO, ThingsMeet Solutions, a Pune-based healthcare tech startup.

The revised EHR standards-2016 which is a continuation of its 2013 version paves the way for uniform standards of capturing, storage, retrieval, exchange, and analytics of healthcare data and information, including images and clinical codes. It also contains guidelines for maintaining privacy and confidentiality of such information.

Welcoming the government's initiative to come up with EHR standards, Joshi said “It will help healthcare ventures provide the right platform for eHealth and further provide all with a practically attainable and sustainable standard of healthcare. It will help digital healthcare platforms evolve technical innovations and deliver affordable solutions and share medical information. The initiative will benefit patients as they will not need to repeat diagnosis and similar procedures, which will translate into faster treatment at affordable cost.”

Healthcare sector is considerably data dependent. With the use of information technology, healthcare data can be accessed, stored, analysed, transmitted. With rise in use of home healthcare devices, quality healthcare data is getting generated regularly. Such data also have long-term clinical efficacy and helps the government and healthcare providers set up public health trends in particular areas. This will considerably contribute in preventive care, improving delivery, disease control, medical education and training, health management and health research, he said.

We see over a couple of years, the EHR guidelines are firmed up and doctors and hospitals are supposed to share data using these standards. As of now the guidelines are not compulsory. Given awareness, the penetration of insurance companies which need codified health data, it is required to have EHR information available. Both doctors and patients are soon going to demand this, he opined.

Awareness about health, rising disposable income, government's increased budget are key drivers of digital healthcare market in India growing 20% CAGR over next 4-5 years. The market is likely to expand USD 400 billion. In US, use of one of digital health services has gone up from 13 per cent to 86 per cent from 2013-16. In India 70-80 per cent of people will use one of digital health services in metro cities by 2020.

Countries like India where fragmented healthcare system has led to a tremendous rise in healthcare cost, our digital health platform-- ThingsMeet Solutions is doing remarkable work ensuring people's access to right service providers at affordable rate by aggregating healthcare delivery system. Aggregation model where quality of healthcare is essential is going to be helpful to healthcare industry, concluded Joshi.