Renowned cardiac surgeon Devi Shetty sees India undergoing major changes in medical education and healthcare within the next couple of years and advocates technology-enabled solutions to address pressing health issues. Delivering the keynote address at the World Innovation Summit for Health in Qatar last week, he said the next big thing in health care would not be a “magic pill” or a new operating procedure but Information Technology.

“The Narendra Modi government is very progressive,” he said, “and one will witness major changes in medical education and healthcare in India in the next couple of years. There is no other choice. You cannot have a country with a Gross Domestic Product shooting up to seven or eight per cent and 80 per cent of the population not having access to proper healthcare. They have to bring about change.” He referred to estimates by the World Health Organisation, which has predicted a shortage of 12.9 million healthcare workers, and said his own estimate would suggest the figure would be twice as much and India required three million new doctors and six million nurses as of now.

“What we can do collectively and what is desperately required in this world is a global university for medical nursing and paramedical education,”said Shetty, who runs Narayana Health in Bengaluru. Noting that it was very expensive to start a medical school in India, he said there was the need to change the way medical colleges were established. “We need to change it because the cost of medical education has to come down significantly. Children from poor families should get into them and become doctors.

“Outstanding doctors throughout the world, who have magic in their fingers, a passion to change things, generally come from a deprived background. These are the children who have fire in their belly and work for 18-20 hours and change the way healthcare is delivered,” he said.

“Existing medical universities will not be very happy with this concept (global university). It is not required that every country have its own medical university. India can afford to but a lot of African countries cannot afford it. Having a global university, one can actually reduce the cost.”

Another big thing in healthcare, he said, was online clinics and elaborated that in the coming 10 years all out-patient services provided by doctors would disappear and patients would stay home and get online consultations. He also spoke about replacing paper charts with ipads as this would dramatically reduce the risks of hospitals and doctors making medical errors — one of the biggest problems in health care.

There were around 850 million mobile phone subscribers who were spending about Rs 150 per month and “if we can collect Rs 20 from each mobile phone subscriber we can cover the healthcare cost of 850 million people. This is the beauty of technology, which brings millions of people together”, he added.