Healthcare should transform to patient-centric: Karnataka Health Minister Sudhakar

Bengaluru: Stressing on the need for transformation in the healthcare sector, Karnataka Health Minister K Sudhakar at the Private Hospitals and Nursing Homes association's (PHANA) IIIrd National Health Summit on Saturday said that healthcare should be shifted from doctor-centric to patient-centric and hospital-centric to home-centric.

Karnataka Health Minister K Sudhakar on Saturday said healthcare should transform from being doctor-centric towards being patient-centric and from hospital-centric to home-centric.

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Speaking at the Private Hospitals and Nursing Homes association's (PHANA) IIIrd National Health Summit, Sudhakar said, "In the current world, we are seeing a massive rise in new technology such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. There are new tools that allow us to make incredibly accurate diagnoses which will help provide effective treatment in a timely manner."

The Minister urged PHANA to work towards ensuring healthcare is affordable, accessible, and available. He further pointed out that a few private hospital chains lack adequate transparency.

He further stressed on healthcare being focused on '4 Ps' – Personalized, Predictive, Preventive and Participatory. He added that "we must move away from the '5th P' which is Pills."

"I urge PHANA to look into this issue to ensure that digital medical records are made available to the government. This is because, unless we have adequate data, the government cannot come up with effective health programs both at the state and national levels. Healthcare should transform from being doctor-centric towards being patient-centric and from hospital-centric to home-centric," Sudhakar said.

The Minister said the state government has screened 60 per cent of the population for Non-communicable diseases (NCDs).

He said, "NCDs are a big threat today and every 4th person has diabetes today. We do not have a large data pool on this. We see a rise in NCDs such as hypertension, diabetes and cancer are on the rise. This is the reason Karnataka has taken up the task of doing mass screenings to develop a data pool."

He said Karnataka can only become a wealthy state if it becomes a healthy state. Sudhakar said the government will take measures to curb red-tapism as we firmly believe in promoting ease of doing business.

"Large hospital chains are growing currently, but I would like to see mid-sized hospitals with a capacity of around 100 beds grow. I Do understand that there are some bottlenecks such as annual renewals. I will speak to our Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai to try to make it a single-window process and increase the time period to three years," the Minister added.

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