'India will produce maximum affordable healthcare solutions'

India is the country which will produce maximum affordability on healthcare solutions deploying digital technology, an industry expert said on Friday.

"India will leapfrog a lot more in creating affordable solutions using digital technologies because 80 percent of the population pays for healthcare out of pocket and when you pay out of pocket, you are most sensitive to cost," Medwell Ventures chairman Vishal Bali said at the Philips Digital Healthcare Conclave 2015 here.

He praised the burgeoning Indian startup ecosystem for disrupting the traditional business models, and expressed his belief that the extremely large Indian mobile phone consumer base will empower multiple new healthcare solutions.

"Indian healthcare startups alone have managed to receive $108 million of venture capital funding until now, and this is a great development," he said.

Emphasizing on the power of digital technologies, Philips Innovation Campus CEO M.R. Srinivas Prasad, referring to rising dengue cases, said that an app to identify their origin and one for directing the cases to available clinicians and hospital beds at a very early stage could have contained the situation.

"We are looking at data and analytics to enable a clinician to handle more patients," he said.

Philips is also organizing a marathon hackathon to identify the best healthcare solutions at the one-day Digital Healthcare Conclave and aims to apply mobile, digital and cloud technologies to improve healthcare for the common man.