N. Raghuraman's column: If you are interested in the healthcare industry, then focus on digitization

If you have ever gone for a health check-up on Saturday, you must have noticed that this is the most crowded day in hospitals and you must have been disappointed to see a long queue at the registration counter. There are two reasons for this: 1. No patient wants to spend Sunday off in such work. 2. It is not easy to get the old record of the patient by just entering the telephone number of the patient at the registration counter, so the same old entries like name, address and disease have to be entered again. I don't have the right to say this, but a well-known figure in the medical industry says this. Dr. Sangita Reddy, Joint MD, Apollo Hospitals, Hyderabad, recently officially stated that "Documentation, finding information across different systems, making the same entry over and over again, and managing fragmented workflows takes time. When this burden is reduced, clinicians will be able to focus on what innovation or money cannot buy, and that is to focus on patients. According to this renowned representative of the care industry, the situation is going to change very soon as India's healthcare sector is making great strides in digitising records. If we talk about the accounts related to Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, then by 2026, 80 crore health records have been linked. The next step will not only be to add more data to this data, but to create a system in which doctors can get old patient records immediately and with less effort and they will be able to make better decisions. This will happen only if all the systems continue to work in the background. The care industry is now moving towards a unified digital infrastructure that makes it easier to fill operational gaps. Every hospital will strive to strengthen their clinical judgments, enhance data security, coordinate departments, and keep every patient's care private and respectful. To reach this level, the centralized identity and access management system should ensure that employees from different departments in the hospital access only the data that is required for them. For example, a urologist should have access to not only a urine test report, but also a sonography report. The AI tools will continuously monitor and analyze network activities and identify unusual behavior in real-time across applications and devices. The future of the care industry is now moving from a reactive approach to futuristic prediction. That is, what can happen to the patient in the next 5-10 years and what preventive care he can adopt from now on. Patients abroad are encouraged to view healthcare not as a monthly or short-term expense during a sudden illness, but as a long-term investment to protect their productivity and stability. This shift from 'reactive' to 'predictive' care has created a huge demand for technical experts. This includes AI and machine learning engineers, health data scientists, cybersecurity experts, telemedicine platform specialists, and interoperability architects. Digitization doesn't just mean coding. The process also requires humans handling new digital workflows. This is also creating opportunities for non-IT professionals. These include Clinical Informatics Specialists, Digital Health Product Managers, Medical Scribes, Document Specialists, Telehealth Operations Leads, and Health Insurance and Claims Analysts. Some hybrid roles are also emerging in this evolution, such as AI Safety Auditors, EHR Implementation Specialists, and Health Data Managers. The trick is that even though AI is willing to do our simple tasks today, the healthcare sector stands in front of us with open arms. Enter into it with digitization in mind and build the future.