Access to affordable and high-quality healthcare is one of the fundamental human rights. But, being one of the world’s largest populations, India has traditionally dealt with a massive disease burden. Despite the limitations of technology, infrastructure, and human resources,  the government is focusing on expanding the number of hospitals and healthcare infrastructure in various ways. Improvement in the primary care infrastructure in rural regions is still a long way off.

So far, diagnostic services have been heavily concentrated in major urban areas due to the prevalence of institutional healthcare, and the clustering of medical professionals. Now, the country has truly woken up to the fact that more is needed. 

There are new initiatives taken by the government to expand personalized care and awareness in rural areas as well. Initiatives to promote preventive diagnostic checks and monitoring of vitals are helping in the proactive identification, containment, or prevention of various diseases.

India is blessed with technological knowledge, and a massive talent base of innovators, as well as healthcare experts who are now pursuing the cause of using digital technology to build domestically manufactured diagnostic devices. In the recent Union Budget, a lot of emphasis was put on this fact. 

Coming in the wake of the pandemic that saw a surge in demand for remote patient monitoring, digital diagnostics at the point of care, and medical devices that can be conveniently used by people with basic digital literacy, this focus by the government is a golden opportunity.

The diagnostic market in the country was estimated to be worth around USD 10 billion. It is now posting an estimated 14 per cent CAGR and is expected to cross the USD 20 billion mark by 2026. Apart from the large population, and growing awareness of diseases, there is another major driver that is going to boost the growth of diagnostic services in the years ahead – the learning that digital healthcare technologies can be effectively and quickly deployed at scale to ensure access to people irrespective of their locations.

In recent times, home healthcare and point-of-care diagnostic services benefited millions of people. We also witnessed the successful deployment of portable diagnostic technologies in areas that typically remain off the conventional medical networks.

While there are numerous diagnostic tests that are mostly based on blood or urine specimens etc to identify a condition or monitor it during the early stages. However, the conventional approach of collecting a sample, sending it for lab evaluation, and then collecting the reports can take several hours or days depending on the geography. 

On the contrary, advanced digital diagnostic devices can carry out the primary screening of samples on the spot, and patients can get the reports within a matter of minutes, without going anywhere. 

Doctors can access the reports digitally, and diagnose and recommend treatment and medication digitally, even if they are hundreds of kilometers away. In fact, the superior quality domestically made devices can even measure ECG and various other vitals to provide an even clearer picture.

The recent budget is also proof that the Government of India has now started putting its weight behind the development of such technologies. Two major announcements have been made in this regard in the Union Budget 2023.

Dedicated multidisciplinary courses for medical devices are to be launched in existing institutions to create skilled human resources for the development of advanced medical technologies, high-end manufacturing and research in the area. And proposal of a separate act to regulate medical devices separately from the laws applicable to drugs as is the case currently.

There is no doubt that these two measures are going to be crucial in encouraging the development of diagnostic devices in India.

Further steps to make India 'Atmanirbhar.

The government has shown the right intent, and now we need to do more to provide necessary patronage to the diagnostic and medical devices industry in India. For instance, increasing customs duty, and GST on imported devices is a key measure that can make homegrown devices more viable compared to cheap Chinese imports which still account for the bulk of devices in use.

It is also imperative for the government to focus more on making domestically manufactured diagnostic and medical devices preferential for public sector healthcare institutions, and offer subsidies to private sector players who choose Made in India over imported. Growth of the market would further drive the manufacturers to improve the performance of the devices and bring economies of scale into play.

With the right fiscal and policy initiatives to protect, and promote domestic manufacturing of such devices, we can achieve the objective of Universal healthcare for every Indian within this decade.