Author: Dr Sushil Patel, Founder, Director, DocX Systems Pvt Ltd
Introduction:
Doctors, hospitals, clinics, and diagnostic centres face growing competition in today’s healthcare industry. In India, more than 1L new medical practitioners are registered every year, and hundreds of new hospitals are built.
For new practitioners, it is challenging to be noticed and carve out their space in the industry. Gaining visibility for their practices among peers is particularly tough for newcomers. It is becoming more challenging for seasoned players as their way of practising is siloed. As a result, providers need to be more efficient and able to have successful and impactful practices.
Let’s take a look at each of these challenges:
- Visibility – Patient referral between doctors or doctors to hospitals/diagnostic centres is essential in medical care, but it is pretty manual. There is no unique platform to offer the digital experience for existing referral practices and build enough genuine visibility to each other.
The existing referral practice is tedious and cumbersome. There is no unique platform for doctors to develop their most professional profile, which is why appropriate Doctor Search (for patient referrals) is only on the web OR doctor’s directory. Similarly, hospitals have no unique platform to showcase their services to fellow doctors.
- Control—The industry lacks a streamlined referral system with a mechanism to convert referrals to appointments and consultations with utmost traceability. Doctors and hospitals cannot study their referral trends, which can help them expand their practices and define the right marketing strategy to grow and gain visibility.
- Confidence – There is still a pool of patients in India who see medical matters fearfully as they do not understand them. The ecosystem is not very friendly and transparent, especially when they must consult multiple doctors for their ailments. If the ecosystem is transparent, friendly and proactive, they will have confidence that healthcare professionals are working collaboratively to help them, and they will be more comfortable.
The Solution: Connected Practices
These challenges call for genuine practice methods to make healthcare professionals impactful, efficient and fair with each other – for the good of their patients.
The solution is Connected Practices.
The current referral practice functions in analogue and is open-ended. Connected Practices bring ease of use and manage referrals with digitisation. It should connect referring doctors to referred doctors/hospitals digitally while keeping the patient in the loop. It should also be able to exchange referral notes digitally.
The system has to be efficient, quick, transparent, information-rich and hassle-free.
This tool provides a platform for doctors and hospitals to grow professionally by increasing visibility and productivity. For seasoned practitioners, this is the best way of providing services to patients. Overall, it can be an additional Revenue Generator Tool.
The Impact
- The efficient and transparent ways of practising bring great productivity to the industry. This directly impacts millions of doctors, thousands of hospitals, and diagnostic centres.
- If patients become comfortable dealing with the providers within the industry, it will positively impact every patient in the country—that’s a few hundred million lives!
DocX – Digitalizing Connected Practices
DocX is a network of products designed for doctors, hospitals, diagnostic centres, and connected businesses. It is a suite of products connected to help doctors and the healthcare industry in their various growth aspects, including professional networking, academics, keeping themselves updated on innovations, research and other high visibility opportunities in career and business. It provides doctors and hospitals high visibility among fellow doctors.
Referring a patient has become easy with just a few clicks. The platform provides real-time referral tracking, increasing productivity by saving time and energy. The detailed insights it provides ultimately allow growing professionals to have connected practices. Most importantly, the system is safe, secure(encrypted end-to-end), easy, fast, and reliable.
