Futuristic healthcare technologies can play a pivotal role in bridging the dangerous gap in the continuum of care of cancer patients caused by the black swan event
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a double whammy for patients and physicians. While millions lost lives from both groups worldwide, lockdown and social distancing restrictions prevented patients from visiting physicians for regular check-ups or even emergency events.
The unprecedented disruptions have impacted the operations of all sectors. In the case of healthcare, disruptions in the continuum of care can be fatal, particularly for patients with life-threatening chronic conditions such as cancer. With oncology services affected, the lack of regular monitoring and check-ups has left cancer patients highly vulnerable.
Impact of delayed care
Non-communicable diseases (NDCs) like cancer rely heavily on early diagnosis to minimise mortality rates. Therefore, delays in diagnosis affect treatment outcomes and the survival of patients. As per an ICMR and National Centre for Disease Informatics and Research report, India’s cancer cases were estimated at 1.39 million in 2020 and expected to rise to 1.57 million by 2025.
But given the pandemic’s impact, the morbidity rates for 2025 and beyond are likely to rise because of the delays in diagnosis and treatment since March 2020. Of course, this holds good for other NCDs too, which have been similarly affected.
There are multiple reasons why NCD treatment has taken a backseat, including an immediate focus and allocation of resources to combat coronavirus at the cost of cancer and other chronic conditions. Consequently, even across dedicated cancer care centres, there was a huge drop in new registrations, major surgeries, outpatient services and the number of imaging services used.
Simultaneously, cancer screening camps for early detection of cases concerning cervical, breast and oral cancers also dropped. Since these cancers account for more than half the total cancer burden in India, there will be delayed diagnosis of new cases. Detection of cancers in advanced stages will then trigger higher mortality rates sometime down the line.
It is against this backdrop that GE Healthcare’s India Edison™ Accelerator platform can play a vital role in driving more robust healthcare outcomes through tech-enabled tools, including AI algorithms.
Dr Shravan Subramanyam, President & CEO of GE Healthcare – India & South Asia Region and Managing Director – Wipro GE Healthcare said, “GE’s strategy is to build applications that have a core competency, focusing on niche areas that are our forte. At the same time, we are partnering with other healthcare players who can complement us by bringing their applications onto our platform. As a robust ecosystem, GE Healthcare aims to build a larger network to provide patients with a wider choice of medical care offerings. Currently, we are looking at partners or start-up entities for this.”
Towards the above objective, the India Edison™ Accelerator programme has held three Cohorts or editions over the past three years for facilitating GE Healthcare’s awareness and networking efforts. To elaborate, the India Edison™ Accelerator platform is an advanced intelligence offering used by GE Healthcare’s internal developers and strategic partners to develop new healthcare applications, smart devices, services and AI algorithms. In the next few years, the India Edison™ Accelerator is expected to become central to GE’s healthcare ecosystem and an important hub for healthcare innovation with thousands of applications and services available on it.
Noting the emergent need for next-gen technologies and diagnostic solutions in oncology, cardiology and genomics, the 2021 India Edison™ Accelerator has associated with six start-ups from these areas for its third Cohort. These healthcare domains were chosen as the continuous disruptions from COVID-19 necessitate advanced solutions to plug the gaps in healthcare delivery and treatment continuity.
Future-ready solutions
Coming to futuristic solutions, to cite just one example, GE Healthcare has a product called Predible. An AI-based solution that helps accelerate CT scan readings, the company deployed this recently during the COVID-19 upsurge. Typically, a scan centre or CT scan machine is deployed for 100 patients per week. But during the COVID peak, the machines were deployed among 200 patients, making it most taxing for radiologists. Therefore, the company deployed Predible to ease their burden.
Added Dr Shravan Subramanyam, “In every Cohort, the need of the hour is assessed. The post-COVID environment of Cohort 3 saw a significant update on remote patient monitoring, virtual care and virtual hospitals, with the focus falling on specific clinical carriers such as oncology and cardiology. Accordingly, we are seeking specific companies with specialisation in areas such as oncology, cardiology, remote patient monitoring, data aggregation and suchlike. Those companies are now being on-boarded onto GE Healthcare’s ecosystem.”
India presents unique challenges with its disproportionate concentration of advanced healthcare centres in cities. As a result, people in tier 2 and tier 3 geographies and rural regions visit cities for medical care. Considering the pandemic scenario, they are reluctant to do so. Therefore, one needs to find ways to address their concerns and take healthcare to rural areas without necessarily building the same level of infrastructure as in cities.
Additionally, Indian patients seek care more reactively than proactively. That’s an issue one could address by finding ways to screen patient’s better and using AI to understand healthcare data trends that will pinpoint solutions. For instance, through precision medicine, one can take a particular patient based on their age, gender, family history and clinical symptoms along with genomic or imaging data. One can then target a specific therapy that may not be the same for everyone.
In other words, someone else with the same symptoms and similar diagnosis may need a different therapy. So, the overall patient journey can be completely different. For target therapy, one needs a tremendous amount of data. Then one studies the patterns to discover what happens for specific cohorts, patients, geographies and genders. Thereafter, the treatment can be targeted. Since this is extremely difficult for clinicians to do, the healthcare system needs support from data analytics.
These are some domains where, as a disease or therapeutic niche, GE Healthcare is focusing immense efforts to understand the problems from a patient’s perspective. We then intervene by adding a layer of technology to solve some of those issues. In diverse cases, it may be logistics, skills or technology.
In essence, with COVID-19 adversely impacting cancer care in India, GE Healthcare is deploying health tech innovations to surmount hurdles and bridge the current care gap to ensure morbidity and mortality rates remain well under control.
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