New Delhi, May 13 (IANS): The Indian online healthcare market has seen an exponential growth in the last two years of the pandemic. Valued at Rs 460 billion in 2020, it is expected to reach Rs 3,228 billion by 2026.
During the 2021-2026 period, home healthcare solutions is expected to become the fastest-growing segment of the market as a result of social distancing rules and self-isolation norms that are in place to curb the spread of Covid-19, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com.
The market is broadly segmented into home healthcare services, devices, and solutions.
According to Tushir Aggarwal, Head of Engineering at Tata 1mg, E-pharmacy, e-diagnostics and e-consults -- all involve multiple stages and actors to fulfil the user journey which requires an integrated and collaborative approach between different systems.
Agrawal told IANS that for a seamless user experience, it requires information to flow through different layers accurately and in a timely manner, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) is empowering them to have an edge in many facets of running its business.
Here are excerpts from his interview:
Q: The pandemic accelerated the digital transformation journeys of most enterprises. Can you tell us about your key strategic pillars on which you are looking to build Tata 1mg's digital strategy?
A: We have always been following a digital first strategy from day zero to make healthcare understandable, affordable, and accessible. Stability, scalability, optimisations and progression have been the core pillars of our technology.
The user journey's that we facilitate on our platform are sensitive and critical in nature and there are multiple steps involved with different participants supporting each step of that journey.
Therefore, it becomes even more important to have as much digital automation at each step as possible. With an innate focus on digitising our operations, we have been constantly working on transformations that enable our users to have seamless experience while engaging on our platform.
Q: While the pandemic has increased our reliance on health-tech, people are also more conscious about their health data. How are you safeguarding user data and how do you see the regulatory landscape evolving?
A: In healthcare, we not only deal with personally identifiable information (PII) data but protected health information (PHI) data as well which brings a dual challenge on the table to safeguard the user data. When we think of data security, we not only think of protecting the data leak but also how we preserve the data for the user for any reference at any point of time in future and provide users with easy to understand and meaningful information out of that data.
Data needs to be protected whether in-use, in-transit or at-rest and to ensure this we follow a rigorous and holistic approach with encryption, SSL handshaking, data backup and archival, access authentication, security reviews to mention a few.
Q: What has cloud technology allowed you to do better as you build an integrated healthcare services firm with both online pharmacy and diagnostics?
A: E-pharmacy, e-diagnostics and e-consults -- all involve multiple stages and actors to fulfil the user journey which requires an integrated and collaborative approach between different systems. For a seamless user experience, it requires information to flow through different layers accurately and in a timely manner. The infrastructure and services support that we get on cloud allows us to stitch together this journey in the best feasible fashion.
With firewalls for security, computing power, varied storage options and network available we get ample support for all our use cases. On top of it we can scale up and down both horizontally and vertically at any point of time which augurs well for the dynamics of the business we are in.
Being on AWS empowers us to have an edge in many facets of running our business. With the technical expertise we get from the AWS team in terms of reviews and suggestions, we can reduce our infra costs further. We have also been able to use our resources more effectively as we get a collated and holistic view of all our employed infra resources. With multiple availability zones and increased reliance on their resources, we are more confident on the overall availability of our technology platform.
As an unique attribute of the cloud we get new infra at will, which always helps in reducing time to market for the new launches as there is no infra cliff added in the release cycle. It has even enabled us to streamline our business operations and process in some of the cases where technology intervention aided automation of some of the manual work and availability of the information.