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Indian hospitals are increasingly opting for connected beds over traditional ones to ensure continuous patient monitoring. The connected beds market in India is at the cusp of rapid transformation with the possibility of leapfrogging into a new era of digital health transformation on similar lines that of digital payment use which led to the highest digital transactions globally, said Gaurav Parchani, co-founder & CTO, Dozee.
The preference for connected beds is evident as the technology allows continuous patient vitals data availability which helps in enhancing the quality of care, he added.
Connected bed is a technology enabled bed with a contactless sensor which is placed under a mattress to track a patient's vital parameters.
The global connected beds market is currently at a nascent stage but growing rapidly. It is estimated to touch 880 million by 2028 considering a CAGR growth of 8% annually. In certain developed economies, we see hospitals converting the entire hospital bed inventory into connected beds. The growth is being driven for remote patient monitoring for the aging population where connected beds and mattresses shows big demand across global hospital chains, Parchani told Pharmabiz.
The challenges in the Indian healthcare market are unlike those in the US and Europe because of the biggest bottleneck which lies in the inadequate nurse-patient ratio. Hence a technology that addresses this gap has opportunities to scale faster, he said.
Automation and digitalization are the way forward regardless of the current state of healthcare infrastructure. With connected beds, we have the opportunity to catapult India to a level playing field in providing quality healthcare to its 1.5 billion population, he said.
According to WHO data, India accounts for only 0.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people. For a population of over 1.5 billion, India currently has 1.25 lakh ICU beds and an estimated 2 million hospital beds which indicates an imminent shortage.
The pandemic exposed gaps in India's healthcare system, especially when it came to inadequate hospital infrastructure and a severe lack of medical professionals. Post Covid, the government has given impetus to the hospital beds segment and plans to double the number of hospital beds in the next 5 years. However, critical care consists of two major investments, First is the physical infrastructure of beds ICU capacity etc and second, the nurses, doctors and protocols, he said.
Investments in infrastructure will have to go hand-in-hand with implementing technology to achieve optimum outcomes. Moreover an increase in infrastructure without planned enhancement in manpower will exaggerate an already complex problem. The nurse to patient ratio is a dismal 1 nurse for 670 people, resulting is a shortage of 4 million nurses pan-India. It is impossible to double and triple capacity quickly. So so we need to rethink our basic approach, identify where areas to automate and enable nurses and doctors to give better care in a more efficient manner, noted Parchani.
Over 95% of hospital beds in India are only minimally monitored with manual spot checks by nurses who are already understaffed and overburdened. This makes it harder to identify patients whose condition is deteriorating quickly and provide them with the right course of treatment.
Currently code blue events outside ICUs are high owing to scattered monitoring where vitals are checked once every few hours manually by a nurse.
Dozee’s technology requires minimal intervention from the nursing staff or effort from the patient. An intelligent connected bed monitors heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, ECG, and temperature. This automation not only reduces time to intervention, but allows faster ICU transfers, provides better patient outcomes and reduces nursing load, said the Dozee co-founder and CTO.
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