The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented shock to the entire economy, majorly the hospital sector. In the existing situation, embedding sustainability in the hospital sector is the most crucial aspect for reducing harm to the environment. Thus, the question is aroused in front of researchers to study more about the health care sector and to find out certain practices that emphasizes on the sustainability of hospitals sector. During research it has been identified that one of the most important factors known as information technology is playing a very vital role in the success of heath care sector and specially in the era of pandemic. Various technological advancements like digital health care, internet of medical things, smart health monitoring, telemedicine, chatbot systems, emotive sensory web and robotics can play a huge role towards strengthening the healthcare sector leading to sustainability of the entire world economy, paving a way towards better well-being of health care professionals.
TopI. Introduction
The health care sector is considered as one of the largest industry and the availability of good infrastructure at hospitals will ensure the quality of life in each country. The Indian Health Sector consists of hospitals, medical professionals like physicians and doctors, clinic centers, pharmaceutical manufacturer, and medical equipment manufacturer. Health care system of India is divided into two sectors, that is, public and private sector hospitals. These hospitals provide their services at three levels: primary, secondary, and tertiary as described in figure 1 and figure 2 respectively. In the public sector, networks of health care facilities at primary, secondary and tertiary levels provide free and low-cost medical services (Gupta et al., 2021). It follows a tired system of infrastructure of primary health centers, community health centers, district hospitals and medical colleges for delivering services to the patients at large.
The competitiveness of India’s health care sector lies in the availability of well-trained medical professionals. In light of this, demand of medical professionals are boosting because of origin of new diseases (Amin, 2020). To attain the demands of the health care sector witnessed an increased spend by government on health and well-being. In nutshell, there is need to integrate different elements of health care in order to ensure equal and affordable access of treatment to all patients on right time and to spend on new innovations and technologies to improve the quality of care delivered to the patients.
During the last two decades the sudden shift towards the techno-driven approaches had accelerated the demand for innovations, and has pushed the limits of technology in almost every field (Khan et al., 2021). Information technology had revolutionized the way of living. Healthcare sector is also not far behind in opting information technology as they have come to realize importance of information required for timely decision making (Itumalla, 2012). Healthcare information technology is widely asserted to be one of the means for improving the quality of healthcare (efficient nursing care, better care co-ordination, and patient safety) and potentially reducing its cost (Palvia, Lowe, Nemati, & Jacks, 2012).
Figure 1. Public Hospital Classification
Figure 2. Private Hospital Classification
TopIi. Healthcare Sector: A Global Crisis
Presently, the global population is concerned about Corona Virus Disease-2019 and its long term consequences (A. Kumar & Nayar, 2020). The focus of the World Health Organization is on controlling and mitigating the impact of pandemic on the economy. Corona Virus infectivity measures the potential of one individual to infect others. Initially, it took 67 days to infect one lakh individuals but only next four days to infect next one lakh individuals. This sequence has brought the World figure into 185 million cases today. Given this trend of multiplication, India’s health care personnel are abysmally inadequate with single allopathic doctor catering the needs of overall 10, 926 infected individuals (Iyengar, Mabrouk, Kumar, & Venkatesan, 2020). Moreover, the entire healthcare infrastructure consists of 713,986 amounting to 55 beds per 1000 people, situating in India at 155th position among 167 countries. The precarious situation also highlighted the stark imbalance between the demand and availability of hospital beds, ventilators, personal protective equipment kits and trained medical personnel. In light of difficulties faced by hospital sector- decreased revenue, increased cost, increased expenditure on PPE kits, lack of infrastructure and poor quality of services.