Spurt in Technology Innovation
Last updated
Last updated
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The effort of developing a modern EMR that is scalable to a national level will lead to creation of an ecosystem with a range of skills and expertise in technologies such as mobile telephony, blockchain, sensors, artificial intelligence, big data etc. The system will serve as a backbone on which solutions based on novel technologies can progressively be added. Academic institutions, as well as companies, will find niches of interest in the ecosystem.
Innovation in technology in India has slipped considerably in the last decade. More recently, there has been a welcome surge in entrepreneurs offering new tools and apps that target healthcare. Even the health ministry has provided a clutch of apps to the citizens to address some of their needs. However, all such apps are disjointed, islands unto themselves, mostly aimed at providing information or helping the users achieve some limited goals, using patient’s data only minimally. Furthermore, the data collected during usage of such apps ends up in silos, which is of little use to the policy makers or the health professionals.
With NEMRS in place, the developers will be building their healthcare apps for the NEMRS framework, using the rich API it provides, allowing access to relevant information from the system, and in turn feeding all data the apps collect, back into the system.
A critical ingredient for an innovative ecosystem is an open source culture. Despite India’s substantial investment and involvement in software technology, the open source culture has not found roots. The impetus that NEMRS open source project will provide will help in developing such a culture.
Launching a project of this wide scope can be the trigger to propel India into a new era of innovation.